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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.
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.
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'?
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