Why Yahoo Turned Microsoft Down

quarterbuck writes "The NYTimes has up a great blog post that explains a bit of the backstory behind the Yahoo-Microsoft No-deal. While Jerry Yang did not want to sell the company, it is not likely that he could have said No to Microsoft, and explained it to shareholders, without the help of Google. The article gives reasons behind Google's tossing a lifeline to its biggest competitor, and the 'coop-etition' that has been going on between the two companies, which both emerged out of Stanford University."

Comments

Re:Time will tell...

[tb3]

The XBox is not yet 'profitable'. They now have a positive cash flow, meaning they are taking in more money than they are spending, but they have a long way to go to pay back the initial $6 billion investment.

Re:Google and Yahoo should team up

[MightyMartian]

It was when they leveraged their OS monopoly to push Netscape out of the browser market that they got themselves into a legal bind.

Well, actually, they first got into trouble when the DoJ began investigating their OEM agreements in the early 1990s, and it was discovered that Microsoft was in fact penalizing, or at least threatening to penalize PC manufacturers who wanted to ship alternative operating systems by charging them much more for DOS and Windows licenses than those manufacturers who basically guaranteed the only operating system that would be shipped out on their PCs would be from Microsoft. That's the origin of the Microsoft "tax", which so far as I can tell, the DoJ never managed to get rid of.