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Yahoo Interested In a Microsoft Buyout, But Microsoft Isn't
Linux Blog writes "The Google-Yahoo advertising deal has been rejected by the Department of Justice, and Google has pulled the plug on a search-ad partnership with Yahoo that would have given Yahoo major new revenue, but that raised antitrust concerns. Now, Yahoo has said the 'For Sale' sign is still on its front lawn and that Microsoft should buy the company. The internet portal's co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang made this comment despite the fact Yahoo rejected a $33 a share offer from Microsoft back in May. What a huge loss for the share holders. Microsoft was quick to respond that their buyout efforts were a thing of the past, but left the door open to a search partnership."
I thought Yahoo gave MS the finger a few months ago. MS offered $33/share for Yahoo, who is now worth $14. Epic phail for Yahoo.
Cause all Yahoo is good for is fantasy sports, and I don't really want Microsoft to fuck that up.
If we relate buyouts to marriage, partnerships to casual sex and the Department of Justice to the organisation that's meant to protect teen celebrities from big bad grown up pedophile celebrities... you get the picture.
Maybe Microsoft is only waiting for a cheaper Yahoo. I believe that next time (within 2-3 months ?) they will offer 20 $ or less.
Offer $.50 per share, nothing more. Yahoo is a dead brand and a dead service.
I am *shocked* that Yahoo didn't take MS's first offer and run away, giggling.
Yahoo has no chance for any kind of meaningful partnerships now that MS and Google are no longer in the picture.
It's worth watching.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
too late.Microsoft aren,t interested now
... until they can get the pieces of Yahoo that they want for a good price. There is certainly no rush in this climate.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
They're like a prostitute with no clients and a huge "won't anyone buy us" sign strapped to their heads...
Don't mod this funny, I'm dead serious.
Someone please walk me through this. A few months ago, MS was trying hard to rape-buy Yahoo who debated itself like a virgin Catholic schoolgirl. Now Yahoo is getting on its knees and MS doesn't want it anymore? What on Earth happened to the both of them in the meantime?
You just got troll'd!
Where's your middle finger now Yang? Do you see the pitchforks and torches of shareholders on the horizon? Hope it was worth it.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
changes give their customers Yahoo web interface, even though I don't want any advertising, I got one word to say:
Ya-fu&-hoo!
Yahoo should auction off its outstanding shares on eBay. I've got $5 right here.
--
make install -not war
Are they still around?
First, Yahoo kills their music store, and everyone with music tracks from them are now left with NOTHING. Now they lose their ad revenue deal w/ Google? If MS truly isn't interested any more (i.e.- their lack-of-interested isn't a bargaining chip), could this be it for Yahoo? What do they have left that's viable?
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
they're going the way of Pets.Com -- eventually anybody who wants a piece of them can get the right one for pennies a pound at the bankruptcy court. why pay more?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Yahoo! is filling the void AOL left behind for millions of users. Their portal and front-ends are regularly visited and they offer good services that are well integrated.
Yahoo: Hey, wanna buy us?
Msft: Hey, remember how we tried to buy you and you repeatedly said "no" and caused us much embarrassment?
Yahoo: Well, yeah.
Msft: Good then. FUCK OFF.
Ya-who?
Here's a company struggling to survive and rather than let capitalism work and let them do a deal with the market leader you prevent it, and watch the company go down the tubes (pun intended). Here's the best part - without Yahoo sucking up advertising dollars, the vast majority of the interest in them will still go to the market leader - but no, you can't allow that to happen and then prosecute any sort of actual abuse - no, you have to prevent the possibility of abuse - you know what's best for everyone after all.
What's next - will we give Yahoo a few billion taxpayer dollars for a bailout?
Great system - government doesn't allow market to work - and then takes money to make it work (for sufficiently poor values of "work").
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/yahoo-plays-catch-up-offshore-tax/story.aspx?guid=%7BB54D432E-20D4-47B3-B7E9-204593E9E00D%7D&dist=msr_2
Long Story Short: MS & Google both have offshore tax dodges setup, so they end up paying around 24% tax rates, while Yahoo pays around 40%. Yahoo wants to join the offshore tax dodgers, but the IRS recently decided to crack down on the practice.
This isn't in the article, but IIRC, Obama has already made it clear that he's going to close such loopholes in the tax code, which will translate to higher taxes on corporations and more revenue for the Treasury Dept. (let's not have the discussion on whether this is a good or bad thing for business and the country)
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
"And now Google and MS don't even want of them anymore."
With Google, it was an understandable problem. But perhaps Microsoft is just playing games.
For me, the underlying issue is this: Have Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates ever made any statements that indicate that they have an understanding of technology? The book The Road Ahead was surprisingly empty of information, and Bill Gates had co-writers for that book.
An answer to that question would help answer another fundamental question: Is Steve Ballmer qualified to buy Yahoo and improve the company? Yahoo paid Terry Semel $528 million for working 6 years, then fired him because he didn't know anything about technology, and other reasons. Would Yahoo going to Microsoft just be another case of billionaires trying to do something about which they know little, and care less?
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See, you're partially on to something. For all his chairs, Ballmer is *sneaky*. We're still bashing Vista as their technical offering, but MS got to where it is by some clever business deals. Way back in the day John Sculley torched Apple when MS pulled a fast one on them.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
SearchTechnology Disease?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Yahoo will pull through this.
Yahoo users were packing and leaving if MS deal was done. Obviously, they are the ones who REJECTED MS offers, even tied to Windows interface and have chosen Yahoo. MS could end up buying yahoo.com domain name while massive numbers of users have already moved to another platform/OS neutral provider named Google.
MS on the other hand does everything to prove they are the very same company who doesn't understand what "Web" is. Opera users are AGAIN reporting Hotmail "new version" major problems. Yes, that is right, the conspiracy which has been said to be very costly for MS is in action again. (search for Opera lawsuit MSN)
I understood Yahoo rejecting MS offer by very good reasons but I don't get how the heck Yang can make such mistake showing a true web/services giant as weak to general public. If he should be fired, he should be fired for that reason. On Web services for general public business, MS is a joke. Owner of Live.com that is. The provider which people (non techie) downloads Google Toolbar just not to use it.
So Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates no nothing about running a successful technology company??? You're an idiot.
Yahoo has nine bazillion users, so it must be worth trillions.
Well, perhaps eight bazillion users since some folks may not welcome the Redmondian overlords. I've got my escape pod over at Gmail ready to go should Yahoo! be boarded.
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
The one and only Flickr. Maybe you've heard of it?
you had me at #!
Apple cannot forever rely on hardware sales alone. They should have their own portal.
.
Microsoft saw a modest 2% growth in profits in its first quarter of FY2009. It held $21 billion in cash in September.
Microsoft is one of the six companies in the industrial sector with a AAA corporate credit rating from S&P - and the first industrial to make the list in ten years.
The others are Automatic Data Processing, Exxon Mobil Corporation, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer.
In 1980 there were 30 industrials with AAA ratings.
In late 2008 the odds are 7 in 10 a US industrial will be rated "below investment grade" - aka "toast:"
Microsoft joins select industrial club with S&P's AAA rating
Layoff the rest of the people you don't need. Cut unprofitable services. Improve the quality of those services that are profitable. Maintain your R&D division. Come up with some new products.
In other words, turn yourself into a profitable, but smaller company going forward. Why, you might even consider the possibility of being around 20 years from now as an independant entity.
I mean, at this stage, why continue thinking "exit strategy" like a 2-year old startup?
I know, I know. It's an odd idea in hi tech. It seems to work pretty well for the grocer, the tailor, the baker and various other businesses though.
Oh, and especially, please, pretty please? Get rid of the obtrusive 3rd party ads. I block all that crap. If you just put a tasteful, static GIF on your pages, I wouldn't block your ads. Nevermind that though; I've paid for Yahoo services before. Their music service was good before they stopped maintaining it properly. I've never paid Google for anything. So. Yahoo, why don't you start serving customers like you once did? Why don't you place unobtrusive ads like Google does?
Whatever you do, please don't change your old-school Finance pages--your GNUPlot based charts would be irreplaceable. Don't get bought. Please.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
No doubt, for all the things I dislike about Ballmer, I'll call a spade a spade; he played this one well. Now he can come back in a month or two when the stock bottoms out and offer $10/share, and with the ball in his court he can probably make other stipulations on the deal. I'm thinking he got this play straight out of Billg's play book - Bill's been known to be an awesome poker player from what I've heard.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Though not wildly so, Yahoo has been consistently profitable. Meanwhile, Microsoft's online division has consistently lost money. In the most recent quarter, their online division lost close to half a billion dollars. Combining Yahoo! with Microsoft would result in an online division run by Microsoft's management, who will lose boatloads of money. Sure, selling Yahoo! would have been great for speculators out to make a quick buck, but how are losses for the foreseeable future good for investors?
Hahahaha...
Oh wait, nevermind.
You know, all these companies sound like teenagers.
The rich asshole kid on the block (M) wants to get the cool chick (Y), not because he likes her, but because she wants to go out with the cool kid (G), and M won't have any of that. But then the cool kid realizes Y is just a whore and dumps her. And now even the rich kid doesn't want her anymore. So everyone thinks Y is a cheap slut. In the mean time, the geeks (Sun, IBM...) don't even try going for the whore because they are busy doing their own stuff. As for the classy chick (Apple), she's single because she looks down on everybody.
The stock market sure is one crazy high school.
Have you ever tried to develop a website that works with AOL's "browser"? Yeah they use IE (but they'll use IE6 or 7 depending on what you have installed). But they also bolt on about 30 layers of crap between the browser and a public IP address. So when something breaks, good luck. No "view source". No javascript debugging at all. No way to telling if the problem is cache related, javascript related, "turbo-awesome-ultra-speed boost" related, "modify your HTML on our proxy server" related, or just "my HTML is fucked" related. You'll never know.
I'll give AOL credit for one thing. They are a serious role model for fighting spam. If your mail server has an issue where AOL is blocking you, you can call their 800 number 24 hours a day and talk to their postmaster. They will send you, the postmaster, an email every time somebody on their network reports a message from your mailserver as spam. Granted most instances are lazy AOL users who hit "SPAM" rather then properly unsubscribing from a mailing list they signed up too, but the day they get a bunch of real spam from my network, you bet I'll be all over it.
Lets not forget they have rather draconian mail filtering rules like "we dont talk to SMTP servers on residential broadband IPs" and "you better say HELO right and you better have a proper reverse IP". The fact they refuse to talk with SMTP servers that dont play by the RFC means I can refuse to talk to the same set of servers and easily justify it. If AOL is blocking "legit" email from bad SMTP servers, when somebody breaths down my neck for blocking the same user, I can just say "AOL already blocks them, so that means everybody must be blocking their email too". Thus I can defer the heat of following the rules and blocking "joe the plumber" using a residential, shitty SMTP server to AOL... everybody needs to email aol.com! Kinda like how I justify not testing IE5.5--if somebody is using IE5.5, everybody's web page must look like shit, so why bother ensuring mine doesn't?
So AOL is a mixed bag. They have a really shitty browser that is impossible to debug. But on the other hand, their mail policies set the bar very high and thus create a baseline set of mail policies that all SMTP servers will naturally follow.
You are leaving out the part about the extra 80lbs she gained after the beer bong coma incident and the loss of 80 IQ points as a result and severe drubbing her popularity took when it turned out she was the Herpes Hilda of the UW.
Nice try.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
It's true, Microsoft makes a lot of money. But is that because the company has a virtual monopoly on something every business needs? If someone had a monopoly on water, he could be richer than Gates and Ballmer put together.
Anyhow, you didn't answer the question. I've never heard Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer say anything that indicates that they know about technology or are interested in technology. I'm not saying they know nothing, I'm just saying that, after all these years, there should be some evidence of their involvement. If you can give me examples, I would be very interested.
Not as bad as you made it look. The MS offer involved MS stock, and if people had taken it, they would now have about $20. Still not the best decision Yahoo ever made.
Microsoft's stock is sure to go back up after the recovery comes. Does anyone honestly think Yahoo's is going to rise all that much?
No, grandparent poster was right. Epic fail. It's one thing to hold out for a better deal when several companies want to buy yours. It's another when no one else really does.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
YHOO was trading for around $30 on the open market at the time of that offer. If shareholders wanted to sell out, they could've just sold their shares through any broker on the exchange, and gotten $30. Instead they wanted to hang on and get the extra few bucks of merger arbitrage; and they lost their bet, since the merger didn't go through.
I don't really get blaming Yahoo's board here--- anyone who wanted to sell out at that price could have, without needing Yahoo's management's permission to do so.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Most of Yahoo's nerfy services aren't designed for the smug wannabe technocrats of Slashdot -- they're designed for their moms. That said, Flickr and del.icio.us are pretty good services, Yahoo Maps suffer only from a lack of imagination, and even Pipes has a reasonable geeky appeal.
What no one seems to be asking amidst all this keening and armchair reffing is what good Yahoo's failure would do for the web. Do you really want a duopoly on major web services? Yahoo's failure wouldn't clear any space in the canopy for new competitors -- Google and MS will continue to either buy or one-up them once they gain buzz, as they have all decade. Without the deep pockets of either of its competitors, it's amazing that Yahoo has survived this long.
Sorry to walk away from a good book-dumping, but I hope Yahoo survives.
Let's take a look at the whole MicroHoo saga from the start...
I wrote about this on TheTechStop.net back in May...
Let's for a moment forget that Jerry Yang is now http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120999265277067343.html?mod=yahoo_hs&ru=yahoo">getting grilled by Yahoo shareholders who think that he just lost them billions of dollars. Let's forget that they overplayed their "Poison Pill" position. The consequences of this bid battle will last for many years, assuming that Yahoo doesn't eventually fall to Microsoft for a much lower price or suffers the slow death of spinoffs and layoffs.
They will now have to make good on their 100% growth prediction. They will have to appease stock-holders who could almost taste a huge payday before it was seemingly taken away by Jerry Yang's stubbornness. They will have to shore up their battle-lines with Google even after they allowed Google into the Yahoo camp. They will be second-guessed, over-analyzed and criticized into the grave --- and Microsoft doesn't even have to lift a finger to make it all happen.
Say what you want about MS as an evil empire. Yahoo got Googled
The stock closed over $30 every day for approximately two weeks. During that time, approximately 700 million buy/sell transactions took place. Unless you were the Yahoo founder (who didn't actually want to sell), there was such incredibly high volume (topping 80 million shares changing hands on some individual days) that you could've sold any realistically sized position.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I don't even get why you'd ask about Gates; hadn't he proved his mastery of technology and the market *long* before he retired? He got his start writing compilers.
As for Ballmer... you may have a point, but you're talking about:
* Microsoft doing really well under Ballmer, vs.
* Microsoft doing incredibly well under "some mythical person who understands technology"
So either way, Microsoft's doing well. They're one of the very, very few tech companies doing well in this economy, actually.
Comment of the year
Yes, the new nerdspeak is as terrible as the old k-kool type k-krap that all the bbs d00dz typed.
If you read digg comments, there are about a million epic fail and epic win comments, such that
I want to digg my eyes out with spoons from having seen them too many times. Even worse,
there seems to be a recent embracing by the nerd youth of a hive mind sort of mobspeak,
egging each other on with moar and epic this epic that. I have been happy that it hasn't caught on
too much in slashdot comments. It is the same as any sort of spectatorship, standing on the side,
never getting involved, but happy and eager to pipe in and cheer or boo with the crowd.
Sort of off topic but keep your foreign memes off of slashdot or we will mod them down,
just like we always have. Right? Now get off of my lawn.
music lover since 1969
A picture is really worth a thousand words. In case you haven't heard there has been some dissent about the value of speculative future business, some doubt about the viability of current businesses, the current reliability of certain previously reliable credit rating agencies, the real value of certain assets and the value of the buck.
On a positive note, soft gold still warms in your hand, continues to have value and cannot declare bankruptcy. If gold fails you, it wouldn't hurt to have a gun.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'd hate to see microsoft buy yahoo just for that reason.
You'll find out at the end of Act III, that's what the play was really about.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
But I'll never filter my mail based on the source, unless possibly it's the address of a known spammer. Why should somebody not be able to run a mailserver on their own machine via a residential broadband connection?
Behavior is absolutely fair game. I definitely require valid HELOs, appropriate reverse IP information, etc etc. But I definitely want to avoid filtering by IP address if at all possible.
Microsoft & Yahoo would be as bad or worse than AOL - Time Warner. The culture clash would destroy Yahoo (and, optimistically, parts of M$ along with it). So in the long run, the buyout would have been a disaster. It's a no-win situation, the market can't or won't support them.
Yahoo needs to do the following:
1. Get YPN out of beta.
2. Treat YPN publishers as partners instead of as scammers
3. Improve search matches for YPN.
4. Get a bigger advertiser depth.
None of those are technologically difficult, but they've been screwing around with them for 3+ years and have shot themselves in the foot because they let AdSense grab a huge market-share. The Google ad partnership would have done nothing (from what I understand) to improve that except to buy them some time, but it would not have improved their position measurably in the sense that they still need to improve depth of both advertisers and publishers.
In short, Yahoo needs to get YPN going and bringing in revenue with publishers and advertisers.
Google and Microsoft need a 3rd competitor, so it is extremely frustrating to have Yahoo just give up.
Bill Gates ever made any statements that indicate that they have an understanding of technology
Noppe. None at all!! Creating a software empire needs ABSOLUTELY NO understanding of technology. Now trolling? THAT needs a very deep technical understanding!
"Gates... got his start writing compilers."
Gates wrote a Basic interpreter. Did you ever write a program for it? I did. It was quirky and limited and poorly documented. Writing an interpreter certainly qualifies someone as interested in technology. But the idealism that is required to be influential in thinking about technology was, and is, lacking.
Microsoft bought DOS for about $80,000. About 10 man-years of programming effort were put into DOS. (Volunteers made the FreeDOS work-alike.) That made Microsoft $40 billion dollars, and gave the company the money to hire people who knew how to write Windows. It seems to me that the unusual circumstance of being able to take something worth about $1,000,000 and turn it into $40 billion is what made Microsoft successful, not unusual technical insight.
How much of "Microsoft doing really well under Ballmer" is due to his managerial ability and how much is due to having a virtual monopoly on something that is absolutely necessary to run a business?
You said, "There are interviews, articles, various live events, etc. etc. that show Gates and Ballmer can quite capably talk about technology."
Over the years I've seen a lot by and about Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, but what has surprised me is how little technical understanding they demonstrate.
Microsoft ignored the internet until it became a big thing, then every Microsoft web page said "internet" even when it wasn't appropriate.
Microsoft bought Hotmail. (A woman friend of mine deleted all messages from Hotmail, because she thought they were porn. LOL)
Microsoft did not have a search engine until it became a big thing, then Microsoft could not compete with Google.
Would a technically knowledgeable person have released Windows Vista?
Why is this relevant now? Because I don't see how Microsoft buying Yahoo's failed search service will help Microsoft's failed search service. And I interpret Steve Ballmer saying he isn't interested as possibly just bargaining for a lower price.
You didn't understand the question.
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I agree, interesting comments from Mickwd. The only mistake MS could have made would be to actually have bought Yahoo! at $31 in a stock and cash deal. Yang was right that the two firms are very different.