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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."
...adapt to their defenses and continue assimilation.
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
Ah, so _this_ is MS after Gates?!?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Yahoo isn't interested - give it up MS!
They don't want to tarnish their good name.
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
As a yahoo user, I feel strangely threatened. I can't explain it, but it"s like a bad ex-girlfriend who just can't accept no for an answer.
Who here find this surprising? Didn't think so.
And we are supposed to believe that MS can create competitive products? It doesn't look much like that. sad.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Not really. Yahoo is dead/dying. Few people search there, most are going to Google. So buying Yahoo is a way to put the three search engines together (MSN, Live, Yahoo) vs Google, Ask and the others.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Core assets = $30 billion USD. I guess that money's burning a hole in Ballmer's pocket.
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
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.
I thought about buying stock in Microsoft, but this behavior appears to be out of spite rather than a sound business decision.
Microsoft buying Yahoo would only have made sense if they never had MSN in the first place. It is buying a competitor to compete with its own products and if they intend to only shut it down or merge it with MSN, its only going to bleed massive amounts of money from MSFT in the process.
The smartest decision would be to let Yahoo die on its own and focus on more "fresh" markets or ones that is truly their bread and butter like Xbox, Office, and Windows. There is no need for it to dominate a market that is firmly entrenched in Google by aquring Yahoo. If nothing else it only helps Google and people who are short selling MSFT.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Not only is this not a car analogy, but...ex-girlfriend?
If yahoo would sell its search business i seriously doubt it will survive many months. I dont think Carl Icahn will let a single dime from any eventual sale of the search business go anywhere but straight into the stock owners pockets. Just like Google Yahoo cant gather any users without its search business regardless of what services they might have.
If they sell Yahoo it has to be in whole or they will waste the total value of the company for a very small one-time gain.
As a computer user i would really like it if Microsoft go out and buy Yahoo, just to see Microsofts faces when every single user jumps ship to Google instead
HTTP/1.1 400
It's still something like 15% last I heard. That may not sound like a lot of share but comparing to browsers it's more than Opera and Safari have put together.
It would be a huge acquisition and could help build a lot of momentum if they can also get some good new stuff out.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
You just described "dogpile.com" ... and dogpile describes Microsoft quite accurately ... hiding in plain sight all along!
It seems like Microsoft is preparing to go without yahoo: http://www.ovum.com/news/euronews.asp?id=7136
This stuff shouldn't be a surprise, in other industries this type of thing goes on all the time. Make an offer, have it rejected, sweeten it etc until the shareholders start selling. Eventually the big shareholders sell when the pot is sweet enough. For Yahoo, it may be a stretch to say they aren't interested at all, they just aren't interested in the present offer. Remember, in the free market, everyone has their price. The question really is how much will MS overpay for Yahoo if they want it that badly.
Didn't Microsoft already decide to abandon the quest for Yahoo! and purchase the search technology from PowerSet?
To be a fly on the wall in these meetings:
Ballmer: Let's buy Yahoo.
Board Member: They won't sell.
Ballmer: Did you ask them, or tell them?
Board Member: A little of both.
Ballmer: Did you say we'll be their best friend?
Board Member: Yeah, but Yang just watched Pirates of Silicon Valley and isn't fooled.
Ballmer: Is that the movie with Johnny Depp, or the good one with Jenna Jameson?
Board Member:...
Ballmer: What's this "PowerSet" thing?
Board Member: That's a start-up Websearch company. They're doing a lot of what we want to do with Live search.
Ballmer: Great! Buy it!
Board Member: Okay, so I guess that takes care of the Yahoo--
Ballmer: Buy them, too!
Board Member: What? Why? Powerset will--
Ballmer: They're working with Google! It's anti-competitive! We have to buy them! And it will make Live search even stronger after we incorperate SourPet--
Board Member: PowerSet--
Ballmer: Whatever! Just buy Yahoo so we can say we're not anti-competitive.
Board Member: You want to purchase two separate Internet search systems, incorperate them into our failed system, to avoid anti-competitive practices?
Ballmer: Finally! It's like talking to a brick wall sometimes, y'know?
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
give me the ball puppy, drop the ball, give me the ball puppy, drop the ball puppy, puppy drop the ball, puppy give me the ball, drop the ball puppy puppy drop the ball, puppy, PUPPY GIVE ME THE BALL, drop the ball puppy, give me the ball, drop it,, drop it, drop the ball
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Fortun'e take on this is interesting (http://money.cnn.com/2008/07/03/technology/kirkpatrick_search.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2008070405). They're arguing that Microsoft's pursuit of Yahoo has little to do with competing with Google on technology...because Google's innovation is not in technology. They're competing with Google's business model. This strikes me as very similar to some of the criticisms I hear on Microsoft: they don't innovate in technology - they innovate in business model (e.g. realizing that Windows/OS's was a good business). It's intersting to see the mainsteam media starting to catch onto Google as business innnovator but not a technology innovator. I mostly agree with two big exceptions. One is that Google clearly has some decent search algorithms. Nothing that can't be equaled or beaten but they do provide decent search results. Two, while invisible to us, they must have some pretty amazing software to manage their datacenters. The irony there is that this innovation is more similar to enterprise software...the old boring on-premise stuff that Google likes to trash.
Am I the only one here that is seeing this Icahn guy as just a greedy dick?
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
for goodness sake, WHY? Seriously. Does Microsoft really think Yahoo will help them? It'll just make a bloated conglomerate even more bloated with extraneous staff and duplicate job junctions. Sure, some of those will be weeded out, but dammit, when will MS get the point that they don't need to be BIGGER, they need to be LEANER and more efficient in doing things. Get rid of redundant redundancy. Stop having 12 guys work on the Start menu. And you wonder why their products are so bloody crappy now. Will they ever learn?
Pax Vobiscum
I usually use babelfish to make words translations, but I was shocked to be redirected from babelfish.altavista.com to babelfish.yahoo.com the other day.
Has Yahoo! bought AltaVista? Wouldn't their new combined marketshare make them an even bigger threat for Microsoft?
What if Yahoo! is in the process of buying all the once-major players? (WebCrawler, AltaVista, etc)
Hes solely in it for the money.
No, but i find most of the worlds population being greedy pricks. While im no communist i do think there are more important things to our society than money.
HTTP/1.1 400
This is brilliant! Release a letter stating that you would be interested if there is a new board. Have Icahn's board elected, which from all I have seen is completely incompetent of running the company should a merger NOT take place. Then make a half-hearted attempt at the new merger, announce that you cannot reach an agreement and now you've hobbled another competitor without spending a dime. Now, if they can just get their act together they could swoop in and grab some of Yahoo! market share. I can't tell if this is incompetence on Microsoft's part or pure brilliance, but it may work out great for them....
When was the first contact between Icahn and Microsoft regarding the yahoo takeover bid?
.. Certainly. I do talk to them, you know, occasionally and maybe more than occasionally on the yahoo! Side"
Exactly when did Icahn start buying yahoo shares?
Who complained to the justice department over the yahoo/google deal?
Who approached in relation to the MS/Yahoo takeover bid?
What exactly is the quid pro quo in Icahn helping out Microsoft on the acquisition?
"I do believe the following -- that this company, yahoo!, is a very strategic and important acquisition for microsoft"
"The only way, you know, that microsoft can compete in the long run with google is to have yahoo!"
"once you've don an alternative deal and given the search to Microsoft, you don't need Microsoft to buy you anymore"
"How closely are you in communication, carl, with microsoft's management?"
"Well, you know, I really -- I wouldn't say closely and I wouldn't want to talk about it anyway, you know?
davecb5620@gmail.com
Yahoo peaked when it released Yahoo Mail. They haven't really done anything new or innovative or even relevant since.
Ballmer get what Ballmer wants.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
Yahoo bought Altavista and AllTheWeb years ago.
All those former well known web search services are just brands for Yahoo search.
btw. Bablefish is just a brand name around the underlying third party software "Systran".
My favourite operating system is ReactOS; binary compatible to WinNT series
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.
"Fortun'e take on this is interesting .. They're competing with Google's business model"
.. :)
.. :)
Insert free advert for Live Search
"This strikes me as very similar to some of the criticisms I hear on Microsoft: they don't innovate in technology - they innovate in business model"
This is new to me, that Ms 'innovate in business model', if by innovate you mean lean on the the OEMs to keep other companies technology off their Desktop, then I can acquiesce to that. Do you have any other examples of Microsoft innovating in business models.
"It's intersting to see the mainsteam media starting to catch onto Google as business innnovator but not a technology innovator"
It's news to me that the mainstream media doesn't think Google is a technology innovator, Is that the current subliminal meme of the day
"this innovation is more similar to enterprise software...the old boring on-premise stuff that Google likes to trash"
What innovation does Google like to trash, give examples and specific quotes?
davecb5620@gmail.com
A company with Microsoft's resources should be able to come up with a better business plan than a buy-in. I think they're impatient, for some reason not yet disclosed.
It's all about Google.
If I were an MS strategist, Google's search business wouldn't scare me. If you lost sleep every time somebody made money doing something technological you'd go mad.
I'd be a little more concerned with Google's foray into online office suites, but I'd be fairly confident that wasn't a serious problem in the short to mid term.
The thing I'd be freaked about is Google's casual way of generating APIs for its popular services. That hits Microsoft where it lives.
This is a relatively low cost, low risk game for Google. Nobody expects them to provide soup-to-nuts service for all your IT needs; they're just throwing API shit against the wall. If it sticks, good for Google, bad for MS; if t doesn't, MS feels no pain, but neither does Google. It's just another interesting idea from Google.
This is like assymetrical warfare: MS is the conventional force, and Google is the guerilla force. Google chooses when and where to stike, and if it fails it doesn't cost them much. Tactical failures can even be strategic victories if they provoke a costly response. From MS's standpoint, it is necessary to limit Google's ability to strike when and where it will, and get away without much loss no matter the outcome. One thing you can do is start to poach on Google's engineering talent; taking people out of a team is disruptive. Another thing you can do is try to hurt them in places where they live, so you want them so focused at keeping their ad revenue flowing that they can't do anything else.
Google's strategic weakness is that it doesn't provide full solutions. It is an interesting technology company, not a product company. That's good for MS because once Google (or anybody else) provides a complete replacement for Office, Exchange and Sharepoint, bad things are going to happen to MS.
Gaining control of Yahoo makes sense for several reasons. First, it keeps them from cooperating with Google, which is the opposite of what MS wants. MS wants Google to have to work harder to get ad revenue, not less. Second, Yahoo is a product company, like MS; it could be the first to offer the complete, MS free product stack. Equally bad, Yahoo could goad Google into upgrading its products so they look more like a viable replacement for MS to enterprise customers.
The picture MS would prefer is Google struggling to maintain ad revenues, and facing a steep uphill battle in product adoption and API mindshare when it looks at MS dominated product areas.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This could be more fun than the Anti-trust trials.
I largely disagree with the suggestion that Google hasn't been a technology innovator. As you point out, their search engine won out because it was massively better search technology than the competition. Then you've got Gmail and Google Maps which took Ajax and web-based-apps to a new level, crushing the competition with better technology. Google also has major innovations in using MapReduce and commodity hardware infrastructure that allows them to scale their technologies extremely cheaply and reliably.
That's not to imply they haven't had business innovations as well - Google Ads and Google Apps are smart business implementations of existing technology. Or, for that matter, making their search engine *search* instead of turning it into a spam portal like other search engines at the time.
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.
They could be sued again. Never underestimate Microsoft's ability to innovate like that.
Seriously, they had better do something. The $40 billion they have spent over the last few years has given the world Zune, Vista, Xbox, lots of worthless patents, a few other failures as well as a few billion lost in lawsuits. This is why their stock price has been flat for five years and never did recover pre dot-bomb pricing. You would have been better off with Tbills and a lot of institutional investors are going to have to answer for that.
They should do to Yahoo! what they did to Hotmail. Take a system that runs perfectly fine on FreeBSD, spend ten billion dollars to switch it over to Windows Server, and get no benefit out of it whatsoever, other than the ability to brag that it runs on Windows, which won't be much of a brag, given all the bugs and problems that will be introduced during the massive job of switching the systems.
If this is the case, then why am I saying that they should do this? For my entertainment and laughing pleasure.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
Are you really saying there's no risk to Google's innovation? They have invested big money in software and data centers.
Microsoft's counter to it is their usual take no prisoners and loot the assets of attack on an established competitor. It's not going to work because they can't really lock out Google or any other portion of the internet where drop in replacements of their product line have taken shape. All they can do is give the world another example of their business ethics. If you look at Microsoft's stock price, you can see that bad things have already happened.
Maybe they can get BayStar to help fund Icahn's take over and make it look like someone else is behind it. Or maybe help by funding a new SCO company looking to get into search engine technology and advertising.
Microsoft has dozens of techniques to undermine Yahoo but if they drive away yahoo customers, will they want to go to Microsoft or Google? Maybe they've got a No-Go-Google feature planned for a Vista update. One thing is certain, this now shows that Steve Balmer will not rest until Yahoo is no longer a Google partner. IMO
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
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. =/
Having big boobs and a catsuit helps too ;)
The mental image of Ballmer wearing that suit just gives me the creeps.
This is all about getting control of the AT&T DSL e-mail accounts that Yahoo provides.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
think of the users? There may be some money in this short term, but in the end it's going to hurt the internet community as a whole.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Microsoft doesn't actually have to _buy_ Yahoo!. They previously made an offer, Yahoo's stocks soared. They "negotiated," and retracted that offer and Yahoo's stocks plummeted further than they had been at to begin with.
Wrong. Just last week Yahoo's stock stabilized to their pre-MS-offer levels.
by describing MSN as a "dogpile" i thought you had made an astute observation.
of course, not the '.com' kind of dogpile, i mean the 'laying around in your backyard where the grass is mysteriously greener and taller' kind of dogpile
I mean, yahoo just plain sucks. People call it an open source company yet it has yet to release an update to its messenger client for linux. their search feature is as good as webcrawler back in 1995 (which wasn't good). their mail service is worse than aol's free mail service. their music service is dead. Besides, for many people who have made it a habit to goto google the minute they open their web browser, its easier/habitual to type blackle.com/google.com than typing yahoo.com.
Uh-- Yahoo's mail service is better than *Hotmail*, and MSN Groups doesn't even *have* search capability for their forums, unlike Yahoo or Google groups (unbelievably lame of Microsoft). The point is not whether or not Yahoo's stuff is better than Google's or AOL's, but that it's better than Microsoft's (which I agree, doesn't take much).
I agree with you. Too many people think that unless you invented the bit and built up from there then you didn't innovate. Every innovation builds on previous innovations. Even if a new innovation is simple a user interface or a slick use of AJAX. Google has a knack right now for taking things that are cool and making them work in a very non-intrusive manner. This is in of itself an innovation. They didn't need to invent email to be credited with inventing a very slick email web interface and API.
Oh and just for kicks MS actually invented AJAX, though they didn't use that term. I'm sure somewhere in the depths of MS there were some engineers who tried to push for a web based office suite like we see coming from Google, but they were squashed because they would have created competition for MS's own cash cow.
Have you used Outlook Web Access? In many ways much better than Gmail. By the way, if you want to look at innovators in AJAX, look no further than Microsoft and their early work on iFrame, Remote Scripting and XMLHttpRequest in IE5.
Not really a free advert for Live Search although I do use both - at least in part because I don't want to give Google too much information...just my very small part in keeping them from total domination. The search quality difference between Google and other good search services is minor. Check out http://www.searchdub.com/ for a side by side cmparison. Here's one result where I compare Google and Live Search...not a lot of difference: http://www.searchdub.com/comparegooglewithmsn.shtml?Fremont%20Solstice%20Parade You have your history wrong with your Microsoft OEM comment. Microsoft's business innnovation was in realizing that software could be a big business in its own right. Prior to Microsoft the software business was dominated by hardware...you buy hardware, you get software. Gates realized that the real innovation and bigger business opportunity would be in writing software for any type of hardware. Microsoft certainly didn't have much if any sway with OEM's until they essentially created the PC OEM business by licensing DOS and then Windows to any and all comers. Compare that to Apple who refused to license MacOS to any other hardware companies. Regarding mainstream media picking up on Google as business innovator vs. tech innovator...you don't get much more mainstream than Fortune. Regarding the "trashing" example...I'll do a Live search on that and see what I can find. Perhaps a better turn of phrase would have been to say that Google seems to downplay the importance of locally running/manged PC and server sofware and suggesting that SaaS is the true future we should all buy into. Others, like me, would prefer to have higher goals...have locally running software that takes advantage of local storage, processing power, GPU's etc AND services that connect me to data, connect apps together etc. Doesn't that sound better?
So I posted a reply to my own post as an AC to clarify my intent, without sacrificing even more karma.
By the way, dogpile.com also includes results from Ask.com. So again I reiterate that dogpile is doing exactly what the OP talked about MS attempting to do with the Yahoo deal.
Actually I think the claims about wanting the search only is a bit of misdirection on the part of MSFT. If you look at the numbers while Yahoo has only had so-so performance in the search field they were(last I checked) number 1 in the webmail category. By joining Hotmail to Yahoo mail they will not only become number 1 in webmail but they will have tons more data to mine.
I personally think they are pointing at search because if they pointed at webmail someone might scream antitrust and tie them up in litigation. But if the deal goes through mark my words,they will just "happen" to buy Yahoo mail when they pick up the search,if they don't just buy the whole thing,which is what I'm betting will happen. They just don't seem to get there is a reason why Hotmail and Live search is doing so badly,and that is because without Noscript and Adblock they are buried alive in ads. And if they do the same to Yahoo I'm betting that Google will be picking up a LOT more Gmail users. But that is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
"You will never get this!! you will never get this!!"
I cannot conjure up enough evil to fitfully bestow upon Microsoft.
No, not a MSFT PR guy. But also not an anti-MSFT flame thrower.
I'll give you one obvious example of where OWA is better than GMAIL: better integration with Exchange. ;)
Microsoft is absolutely using their monopoly, and everything that comes with it, to damage Yahoo to destroy it so they can just take the company.
This is very wrong and Microsoft should not be allowed to make it happen. It is a nasty tactic and they should be called on it by the big companies.
We know taking their search technology will kill Yahoo. We know taking Yahoo will kill Yahoo. Neither of these is what Yahoo wants, but they keep going after it. They are using their monopoly in one area to attempt to build a monopoly in another. They want to get this done before Bush leaves office.
If they don't kill it outright they have used their monopoly to greatly weaken it. They damage its' reputation and keep others from investing in it. Many people feel that buying Microsoft never got you fired, but if you worked for me I would fire you. Microsoft is being extremely manipulative in this move against Yahoo. It also threatens any public company because it is obvious that no one could escape the clutches of this sort of tactic if that is what Microsoft wanted. This is why we don't let a company become a monopoly and stay a monopoly. We should have broken Microsoft up and make them multiple separate entities. This is just a sad state that they still can't compete on merit and must steal other companies and their technology (in whatever way possible) in order to stay in the game.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
This is what I was mostly worried about after reading this.. It's a great collaboration suite thats going to end up in a rubbish bin somewhere if MS gets it's greedy little hands on Y!
This is simply one more step in the dance that will end with Yahoo! being purchased; either by MSFT or someone else. Once Microsoft put Yahoo! into play, the sharks started to circle. Carl Icahn's interest is simply because he sees a profit on the horizon. Yahoo! is as good as owned. This happens in the financial realm all the time, albiet rarely with two tech companies as well known as these.
The manifest absurdity of it is too obvious to require explanation
...in the end Microsoft will have no one to blame.
Such deals rarely involve large amounts of cash, so the problem remains.
Not really a free advert for Live Search although I do use both - at least in part because I don't want to give Google too much information...just my very small part in keeping them from total domination
You should be careful when adjusting the tin foil around the ears, if it crinkles it does not provide proper protection.
vi +
The article provides insight into Microsoft's way of thinking. But, it does not provide an independent evaluation of whether that way of thinking is correct or effective. Basically I believe that it is not. I think Microsoft fundamentally misunderstands the relationships between search companies and their users.
[Microsoft has] an anemic 8.5% of searches, according to comScore. Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500), meanwhile, still commands 21%, to Google's 62%...The only way Microsoft can compete with what the business of Google really is - a large marketplace for advertising and searches - is to somehow achieve much greater scale. No method of creating dramatically greater scale seems available other than combining with Yahoo's search.
I think it's a fundamental mistake to think that a merger is automatically additive--that by buying Yahoo's search business, Microsoft will realize 29.5% market share in searches. This is not paid-for software like Great Plains or PeopleSoft or Salesforce.com. There is nothing of substance tying the people who search on yahoo.com to Yahoo! the company. The only things creating repeat searches are the brand and the search technology.
To achieve a larger ad ecosystem, Microsoft would have to fold Live Search into Yahoo or vice versa. But because there are no financial ties, customers can react to changes however they want. If there are changes to Live.com, it's just as likely that half the customers will choose to move to Google, as they would choose to move to the new Yahoo. When you shake the bird feeder there is no guarantee all the birds will just go next door.
Furthermore, if search technology is not as important, what is keeping people coming back to Google? It's not the ads, which are ignored by most people. It's the search product itself.
I think it's fundamentally backward to think that product elements like brand, technology, UI, etc are somehow not important, but "scale" is. How is scale achieved? The first step to growth is bringing in lots of repeat customers. What brings that? Great consumer-facing products. This is the key to the growth of most of Microsoft's competitors these days. But Microsoft is often not able to solve that. XBox is one example of where they have...they compete directly against Sony on the basis of the product itself.
Buying Yahoo will not achieve product greatness. It's entirely possible they will succeed in making the investment, only to see the combined market share of Live and Yahoo search drop over the next several years. The ONLY thing that can ensure that will not happen, is to create a search brand and product that is more attractive to customers than Google. But if they could do that, they would not need buy Yahoo in the first place.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Jeri Ryan was married to a former shoo-in for the U.S. Senate out of Illinois; a man who liked to show off his wife's amazing body at swingers clubs. She divorced him over it, and had their records sealed, but his original Senate opponent (Obama) filed suit to have the records opened. When the records were made public, Mr. Ryan, who was leading Obama in the polls by like, 40 points, was forced to drop out of the race.
The republicans substituted that freak Alan Keyes, and Obama beat him easily.
So, were it not for the extreme hotness of Jeri Ryan, and her ex-husband forcing her into swinging, Obama would have never been a Senator, and not in a position to be President today.
Democrats should be sending Jeri Ryan flowers or somethin....
Funny, but your point only proves that Microsoft it not interested in Yahoo for its search technology.
I concur. Zimbra is the only competitive threat to Exchange, which butters Microsoft's bread. Yahoo! owns it. Microsoft can't say that because the DOJ might pounce.
I keep telling Jerry to just spin it off again and Microsoft will go away, but he's stopped reading my blog. ;)
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Not really. Microsoft's just buying a new customer base to add to an existing customer base.
There are plenty of reasons to buy competitors beyond simply shutting them down or merging them. A couple of others are to add more diversity or just to confuse consumers as to who owns what. (Car analogy warning:) eg. One of the General Motors tactics in the past was to own many different brands of car in the market, even if they did appeal to a similar base of customers and compete with each other. If you're going out to buy a car and have 6 brands to choose from, there's probably a 1/6 chance that you might choose a General Motors car. But if you want to buy a car and have 10 brands to choose from... and 5 of them happen to be owned by General Motors... there's probably a much higher chance that you'll buy a General Motors car.
Microsoft might decide to try and merge Yahoo with MSN, but there could be at least as much of an incentive to keep it differentiated, because Yahoo's services appeal to different demographics than MSN. What Microsoft doesn't want is for potential customers to drift to something it doesn't own (like Google). By owning and controlling more of the choices, they increase the potential for people to choose something they have a stake in.
I was just about to go on lunch!
Make SELinux enforcing again!
History has shown that with Ballmer, all business is taken personally. Having huge amounts of cash and influence, he is a shark with razorsharp teeth, just like Icahn, but what makes him really dangerous is his fragile ego of a childish despot. Ballmer is not only a very bad loser, losing enrages him; he'd rather completely destroy Yahoo than acknowledge defeat. This way of psychopathic corporate warfare is way over Yang's head. Yang is going to be shown, in a very, very painful way, who considers himself boss in this town. Ballmer is going to get medieval on Yang's ass. Don't be naive about this: it has, since Ballmer was turned down, turned into a full-out, whatever-the-cost-no-hostage-taking-fuck-the-Geneva-convention American war. Everybody will have fled or have been killed in Yahooland when Ballmer's troops come home.
Perhaps you're right but I don't feel particularly paranoid. I just like the idea of PERSONAL computing. You know, the kind where I use my own PC to do what I want and control my data. I like the Web too, for finding information and sharing with others etc. But I'm not interested in a Web-dominant computing paradigm and I'm also not interested in Google or any other company knowing too much about me, my interests, business, communications, purchasing habits, travel habits...etc.
Thank you for taking my last comment as a joke, because that is how it was meant.
It really is a problem. There is one Internet that you will experience if you give away no personal data, i.e. cookies, ip address, name, credit card numbers, etc.
There is second Internet you will experience if you provide this information. Web sites making recommendations to you. Google being able to sift through information and show you just what you are interested in, that kind of thing
Then there is the third Internet, the dark side of the second Internet where parties have collected all sorts of information about you and use it in all kinds of unscrupulous (albiet legal) maners.
It is a brave new world
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