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Microsoft Going After Yahoo! Again
Corrupt writes "Microsoft on Monday released a letter that supports investor activist Carl Icahn's efforts to unseat Yahoo's board, as well as confirming its interest to explore a bid to buy the entire company, or just its search assets, with a new board."
Microsoft is showing how scared it is of losing the online search battle. Maybe because it realizes that it is also losing ground rapidly in software.
The nice thing about Rome is that we still have lots of pretty statues...too bad the same can't be said about old code.
The only reason they're doing so is because Yahoo's shareholders can see that it makes sense.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Yahoo peaked when it released Yahoo Mail. They haven't really done anything new or innovative or even relevant since.
It should be burning a hole in his pocket. Shareholders get antsy when companies hold on to a huge cash reserve without any plans for what they're going to do with it. That cash should be used to grow the company or should be returned to the shareholders in the form of a dividend. Having it sit in the bank isn't helping the shareholders at all.
Microsoft used to say they needed their big cash reserves to fight off giant lawsuits, especially the anti-trust suits. Now that the government has rolled over and given up, though, MS is going to have to come up with something to do with all that cash. Buying up other companies is a popular way to do that.
when did corporate raider get changed to "investor activist"? I must have missed that memo.
Also Icahn and his ilk have no interest in real "investment", he simply wants to boost the stock price long enough to dump it. They don't understand or care that the two companies are a horrible match technology wise, management wise, and corporate culture wise and that a merger between the two would leave Yahoo an empty shell a year later.
Apparently when you are a sufficiently large publicly traded corporation it is expected that you adopt short-sighted suicidal tendencies.
Thus the problem with publicly traded companies... the only thing that matters are the shareholders.
That's the silliest thing ever to say. You could just as easily say, "in a privately held company, the only thing that matters are the owners." You might say one is better than the other, but it's a pointless argument that totally depends on the situation. The mafia can be the owner of a private company, they can't be the owner of a public company, and I would much rather have shareholders coming after me than the mafia.
In any company, a lot of things matter: shareholders or owners, employees, customers, business partners....the fact is if you are depending on ANY company to "look out" for your best interest, you are highly naive. That's pretty much how life is, everyone is looking out for their own interest.
Qxe4
As I said, Gmail and Google Maps took Ajax and web-based-apps to a new level, crushing the competition with better technology. I didn't say Google invented the internet, or even invented Ajax.
Google innovated in these areas by applying creative uses of new technology, and that's why it's Google Maps not Mapquest, and Gmail not Yahoo Mail or Hotmail that everyone uses these days. Google deserves every ounce of credit for these.
And yes, every innovation comes back to some individual or purchased company or whatever who actually sat there and wrote the code. A company (Google in this case) promoted and marketed and guided these excellent ideas and helped turn them into successes. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that process.
I've seen plenty of companies take good people and good ideas, and instead of recognizing and promoting them, they demoralize the individuals and pervert the best of ideas into an abomination. This is often done in the name of "marketing" (check out ICQ's massive failure in AOL's hands), or copying the existing market instead of doing something original (last company I worked for wouldn't even consider doing anything other than directly copying features from the market leader).
A company that recognizes and promotes innovative ideas deserves all the credit they can get.
At this point, considering the approach, I strongly suspect that Microsoft is less interested in purchasing Yahoo! as they are in just removing Yahoo! from the field.
This sort of corporate business makes me weep for our entire culture. =/
But a US corporation has to put their shareholders interests above all else mandated by law. Lots of things matter but customers, employees, partners, etc all play second and third sheet music with the shareholder.
But we haven't gotten to the "extend" portion of it yet,have we? I have no doubt it would be trivial for MSFT to tie some new must have features to some voodoo APIs buried in Windows that would take the Linux guys ages to try to figure out. It's like OOXML and the "render like Office 97",they have so many funky APIs buried in the bowels they could just keep tying new features to different ones and drive the Linux guys nuts. Remember it isn't about not making it work at all,although I'm sure MSFT wouldn't mind that,it is about making sure that any non Windows version runs BADLY. Then they can point to the "immaturity" of Linux and use silverlight as a selling point for Windows.
And finally don't forget the elephant in the room that is DirectX. I'm sure it wouldn't be hard for them to tie some acceleration functions that will slow the machine to a crawl unless it is running DirectX,which will then offload some of the rendering to the GPU. Like i said I'm no fanboi of ANY platform,preferring to use what works for a given job,but like I said they haven't been subtle. MSJava,sites that will either render right on IE or on other browsers but not both,etc. I'm sure if you looked you could find at least a dozen more going back to DOS. it is just how MSFT works,period. And if I had made the amount of cash they have by doing those tricks I doubt I'd change either.
But if the Open Source guys want to compete with Adobe,cook up some low resource using flash killer. But betting on one 800 pound gorilla to save you from the other just isn't a smart move. After all,either way you end up with a VERY nasty 800 pound gorilla that you have to find a way to play nice with. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.