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Ballmer: We're Lucky Microsoft Didn't Buy Yahoo
alphadogg writes (quoting Networkworld): "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer feels intensely fortunate that his company's $44 billion bid for Yahoo back in 2008 never materialized. 'Sometimes you're lucky,' he said with a smile at Web 2.0 Summit, responding to a question from conference co-chair John Battelle. Careful not to offend his search market partner, Ballmer put his comment in context, saying that any CEO would feel grateful for not making a major acquisition in the months prior to the global financial collapse that started in the second half of 2008."
Sure he turned down an offer of $33 a share from MS, only to have the stock plummet to half that value almost immediately afterwards. But he got to tell MS to go to hell, man!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Whenever they feel the need to embark on "yet another ill conceived venture" they could
simply sit on their hands and reap the benefits of not having done it.
Microsoft already owns Apple stocks. It owns lots of Facebook stock too, and that has grown even more than Apple within the recent years and become one of the most visited sites on the internet.
It struck me the other day. I was searching for something on X, and the first five hits were either "Here is a page on X, at the moment it's empty, please submit your user-generated content to us here" or so-called "low-quality content", linkfarm sites that try to stay on the very borderline of legitimacy by having poorly spelled out content with meaningless "comments" to the "articles". It actually happens surprisingly often.
Not to mention when buying a piece of software, there is a 'discount code' field and you try to search and end up in a mindless wasteland of Kafkaesque hell.
Then I wished for some kind of ".nocrap.com" site that only allowed pre-checked websites that were guaranteed not to contain crap. And no, "one mans' crap is not another man's gold" - many sites are by any reasonable standard pure crap.
Then I realised what I wished for was something like Yahoo.
He's also lucky in that it is even more apparent now in 2011 than it was in 2008 that Yahoo is flailing and not doing well at all. On the other hand, maybe if Microsoft had purchased it the new overarching management would have done a better job. Also, part of the failure of Yahoo has been Bing taking some of their former market share. And since Yahoo Search is essentially going to be Bing soon http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8174763.stm that's essentially done with. Yahoo has very little left that it is used that is that popular. When I was younger a lot of people used Yahoo! Games for things like chess, and I understand that that still has a fair bit of use. But that was actually an acquisition from outside http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Games of another website. They've done very little to further develop or improve that since then. Overall, they simply haven't been very proactive with improving their existing services, and of those they have modified it has often been not for the better. In some sense part of the problem is that much of what they have is while not a full walled-garden, it is a garden that isn't easy to move in and out of. And that just doesn't work very well. (Although it does seem like some of the mobile devices are definitely moving back in that direction. Maybe if Yahoo made a more functioning version of their stuff in the form of apps?)
I honestly don't get why anybody would still use Yahoo. The only thing I know people still use it for is fantasy baseball/football/etc. Other than that, there really isn't a reason to stay with them. I have 1 friend who refuses to leave yahoo mail, when infinitely better web based mail solutions exist. Also, Bing and Google have the search market on lockdown. Why would you not use one of those? Any listing from another lesser search engine is going to just get you less complete and/or reliable results.
Say what you will, but I think Yahoo should just slip into the history books along with AOL and Netscape. Even in 2008, I laughed when I saw that Microsoft was going to pay $44Billion for a slowly dying search engine with mediocre webmail. Now since they didn't buy them, they get to laugh all the way to the bank. $44Billion spent on Yahoo would have most likely spelled trouble for even Microsoft, unless they could have somehow turned Yahoo into a money maker (which judging by Steve Ballmer's comments, they wouldn't have).
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
The best thing about Yahoo was Launch.
Yahoo could have been on a gold-mine if they marketed launch better- it was an excellent radio system and could have been much bigger than Pandora is now.
Launch's sorting-routines were much better- it varied music played better. Pandora annoys me- I like one bluegrass song- and then rather than playing the occasional bluegrass song mixed in with other genres- I never hear bluegrass for a month- and then all of a sudden it decides to play 10 in a row.
I think Pandora when deciding what to play- picks one song you liked= and then plays 10 similar songs in a row so you end up with much less variation. Launch was more random what it played.
Anyhow- I think Launch could have been huge, and possibly saved Yahoo if they marketed it correctly and not neutered it right when people were finally beginning to use it.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I was an intern at Microsoft in 2009. Ballmer was scheduled to have this big talk for all the interns one afternoon, and at the last moment, cancelled on us. We were all a bit annoyed, but hey, he's the CEO, 'spose that's what happens. He rescheduled for a week later. When he started, he apologized to us for cancelling. He said "Sorry I had to reschedule you guys. It basically came down to this: for the last 10 years, we've been flirting with Yahoo, and they finally agreed to go on a date with us". He was pretty excited about the Yahoo thing, very gung-ho. Side note: That talk left me really impressed with the guy. I didn't stay on with Microsoft, but I still see Ballmer in a very positive light.