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Yahoo Ends Talks With Microsoft, Embraces Google Instead
snydeq writes with a story from InfoWorld which says that "Yahoo has ended its talks with Microsoft and is instead nearing an agreement with Google. Yahoo's purported reason for breaking off the talks? That Microsoft was only interested in purchasing Yahoo's search business, not all of the company. 'Such a transaction would not be consistent with the company's view of the converging search and display marketplaces, would leave the company without an independent search business that it views as critical to its strategic future and would not be in the best interests of Yahoo stockholders,' the company said in a statement. The deal with Google allegedly involves Yahoo's search advertising business. The move likely will draw more ire from Icahn and may in fact remain part of the elaborate poker game between the two companies. Microsoft said this alternative transaction remains on the table and did not confirm that talks between it and Yahoo have concluded." Update: 06/12 23:58 GMT by T : CWmike writes "Just hours after saying it ended talks with Microsoft, Yahoo announced that it will start running advertising from Google alongside Yahoo search results. Yahoo expects the deal, which has a 10-year term, to generate $250 million to $450 million in operating cash flow during the first 12 months."
I'll go one step further - I can't wait when my Flickr account will be integrated with my Google account ;) (oh, and del.icio.us is also sort-of nice... ;P )
One that hath name thou can not otter
If there was one Microsoft gazillionaire I'd actually want to meet, it would be Paul Allen.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
look beyond the tactics and for a second consider the strategy, what does yahoo really want? What does Icahn want? Ballmer? Google? Who do you think will win after putting the whole thing in perspective?
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Why doesn't Microsoft just use their huge amounts of money and work for it, where is their internal drive and passion? Just get a clue already and stop trying to buy everyone just to get a shortcut.
Jonathanjk.com
But does having one target now help MS in any way? They knew Google was their main competition. If they could beat Google, they could beat Yahoo. The problem was that they couldn't beat Google. Maybe as a consolation they could beat Yahoo but going for 2nd place is admitting defeat too.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Microsoft and google are huge rivals with huge bank accounts, so playing them off each other to compete over you seems like a good strategy. I'm not sure what "wanting" to be bought out by one company vs. another really means to a CEO. If courting google makes Microsoft jealous enough to overbid for Yahoo, I think Yahoo would accept.
Except Yahoo's stock was at $19 before the Microsoft bid and now it's $23.50. How does causing its stock to rise by 24% qualify as 'tanking'?
Why isn't the mafia allowed to buy legitimate businesses with money it has made through racketeering, prostitution, theft, extortion, and kidnapping? This is suppose to be a free-market
The "elaborate poker game" is pure speculation (no pun intended). It is entirely possible that Yahoo mgmt and executives actually think ownership by Microsoft is bad for the future of the company.
This "Yahoo is bluffing" meme assumes that it is illogical for Yahoo to think that they are better off without Microsoft. Why is it so hard to accept? From where I'm sitting, a Microsoft deal would be bad for Yahoo.
These figures are 87.5% bullshit anyway, MSN included.
That is, until the search engines can actually display that 12011674th match.
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Well, if really discussing (unlikely?) Google-Yahoo merger...IMHO Flickr would survive, it has a different target audience than Picasaweb (which is perfect for sharing photos with your family (you know, those people easily confused by Flickr features), but not much more), and actually has a community around it.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Last time I checked, MS was convicted of abusing their "monopoly" while Linux and MacOS existed.
MSN mostly doesn't index forum posts/blog comments (even Slashdot comments).
That *is* one single misfeature which makes it lose to Google, badly. A lot of useful information is hiding in random forums/blogs.
I wonder if it is related to more 'faithful' robots.txt handling - for example, Slashdot's robots.txt disallows 'comments.pl', which probably prevents MSN from ever indexing the content.
Either Google ignores this robots.txt entry, or Slashdot admins have manually configured Google per-site indexing settings to index the comments.
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Google is by nature of progression being too big and no matter how 'good' the leaders want the company to be, the competitive nature is shoving them to the very dark side. (Especially when Google is essentially a marketing company that makes money off of ads and market manipulation.)
It is like taking the the industry's two biggest's evils and putting them in one company model.
Take Apple's (less than truthful and borderline brainwashing) marketing team, and combine this with a company out growing its footprint with so many internal groups and people working with 'competitive' emerging technologies (like Microsoft of the early 90s) and you will get one of the biggest and evil company models in history.
Google digging through GMail years ago should of been the first 'heads-up', but their recent 'embrace, extend, use for the gain, not the consumers' mentaility has taken over tons of OSS projects that originally had no 'questionable' back doors, like Firefox does now with its search monitoring and Google ties that it easily hands the data to at any request.
As for Yahoo, they took a phone book model, moved to a real search engine (finally) and then was able to survive with gaming and IM (online gaming communities being the key for them). Yahoo has market share, not technology that anyone wants. Yahoo doesn't have internal development that is more advanced than Google or Microsoft when it comes to community, development, or search technologies. It would be more of a win for Google, as Google would get a solid IM technology, where MS doesn't need IM or any of the other services.
So I think it is good that Google will eat up Yahoo, so it will go away, but the warning on the label, it is giving more power to ONE company, and sadly this company (Google) is no longer by nature alone a 'do no evil' company, any more than Microsoft of the 90s was.
People act like Microsoft tried to use Windows around 1995 to kill off other companies, but people forget during this whole timeframe and Internet movement, Microsoft was heavily investing in MSN and online technologies, but the Win95 and Win98 OS CDs installed icons and installatino software for everything from AOL to Compuserve, as well as Java and other crap that Microsoft did not produce, most of which being competitive software outside the Windows division.
Google needs a big reign in, or a self check, if not as they doing now, will be bigger and far more evil than Microsoft... And be manipulating the online media with their ad control, like they have already done with their anti-MS shoves to tech journalists.
And in the fragile online world, all it sometimes takes is a mild threat or offering a free venue and some hardware...
Chris P. and his free Macs, just all of sudden deciding he hates Vista because HP wouldn't update their driver for his ancient scanner/printer, and this leading him to love Macs based on usage and 'technical' reasons. And the printer/scanner didn't work any better under OS X, but he failed to admit this part of 'his' story.
However having some contact with him, he admitted he really didn't understand the technology and his defense was that he was not a journalist or a tech person and was just in the entertainment business.
Yet he did 'technical' videos and blogs about OS X and Vista during this time that was information he 'obtained' from both Apple and anti-MS companies of interest, and was using their material because it was easier for him. And yet he made news off all this, and mislead a lot of people in the process for a couple of free computers and guaranteed venues for his 'show'.
Anyone that doens't keep one eye open on Google will find history repeating itself. Even the firefox ties should be enough to scare the crap out of users. Add in Yahoo IM, and their moving 'mobile' presence with a bit of 'borderline' Apple type marketing, and everyone will be racing to screw themselves when Google says, boo, let alone the amount of IT information they already control in the onlin
Microsoft has several monopolies and regularly abuses them. Yahoo being acquired by them would give them enough share to be close to having several more, which would certainly become new monopolies soon as they abuse their other monopolies to make sure that happens.
On the other hand, even if Google and Yahoo merged, that would not necessarily give them even one monopoly. See how it makes a difference?
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/21/business/suit.php
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/01/15/business/fraud.php
As I stated somewhere else on this story, embezzlement and fraud are the kind of things that would give shareholders the right to damages.
And think about it. Where did you develop this opinion? This is the very definition of a meme.
"What is best for shareholders" is subjective. I'd say the very survival of the company is in shareholders' long-term interest.
As far as I can see, msnbot has no restrictions, while Googlebot has several.
I wouldn't know how exactly Google indexes comments, but looking at robots.txt, it seems msnbot has all the advantages.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Their OS dominance has NOTHING to do with a merger with Yahoo. Even combined they'd have quite a bit less than 50% of the search engine/advertising market.
I'm not entirely surprised that so many people here are willing to accept a Google monopoly on the grounds that Microsoft was once convicted of being a monopolist in the OS market. Really, what is it that keeps Google in check if they have no competition anymore? While they may presently be driving forward with innovation, what is the motivation to continue? Some day they might not see a reason to keep spending money on improving their services. I expect there will be antitrust issues raised with a Yahoo/Google partnership anyway.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.