Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are you really saying there's no risk to Google's innovation?
I'm not sure how you get there from what I said. The driving strategic factor behind acquiring Yahoo is constraining Google.
MS looks at Google, and sees its younger self. MS was built around the desktop OS cash cow. Having a cash cow means having room to fail. MS often failed, but used its money to keep strategic projects alive until they could kill the competition. Google might not have the swaggering, mercilessly brutal image that MS in the bad old days did, but make no mistake, they're an aggressive competitor. Worse yet from MS's standpoint, Google has its own cash cow, and MS knows exactly how a cash cow can be used to enter new markets.
Why oh why is Google mucking around with office suites? Because with a cash cow, it's play money to them. As long as the money rolls in, nobody is going to complain. If online office suites turns into a big business well, jolly good, but they can afford to chalk it up as brainstorming. On the darker side, Office suites are a very serious business to Microsoft; it's one of Microsoft's cash cows and one of the pillars of its strategic power. It must be maddening to have a dominant player in the search market mess around in their core business.
Over the years, many MS competitors lost their ability to innovate because they were obsessed with MS, and now Google is doing the same to them. Is it intentional? You decide.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.