Microsoft Just Can't Quit Yahoo

itwbennett writes "Back in October, rumors surfaced (and then quickly subsided) that Microsoft was considering another bid to purchase Yahoo. Now the rumors are back, and this time Microsoft is said to be in talks with other prospective buyers about some kind of partnership to acquire the troubled Internet company."

Comments

Yahoo has value, just not all that much

[Animats]

Yahoo does have some value to Microsoft. Its news, weather, and finance services are widely used. Users of those services overlap with Microsoft's customer base, and are good advertising targets for the things Microsoft sells.

Re:Yahoo has value, just not all that much

[Baloroth]

The service itself isn't what is valuable. The name and user-base is.

APPLE should buy them

[unixisc]

Apple is the company that should buy them, and use iOS & Lion to do w/ them what WP7 does w/ Bing and Android does w/ Google. That's the only buyer that makes sense. Otherwise, which Yahoo! services are so valuable to make it worth adding another redundant search engine to the ones they already have? Hotjobs? Yahoo! Groups? Which ones?

Re:APPLE should buy them

[bloodhawk]

I think you are missing the point. The value of someone like Yahoo is not their technology, it is their user base and brand, you can build the tech they have or license it many times cheaper than the cost of buying Yahoo and as apple tightly control their userbase Yahoo becomes a vastly overpriced company for them.

Re:APPLE should buy them

[Sir_Sri]

That would have made sense the last time we went through this. Now that MS and Yahoo are in bed with each other on the search side of things I don't think yahoo has enough value for Apple to want to even consider it.

The other thing is that yahoo would seriously hurt the apple brand. Apple is about new, hip, cool, yahoo is this (by today's standards) old internet company that those of us who had geocities e-mail accounts still use as yahoo accounts. No one in the reality distortion bubble of Apple is going to see acquiring yahoo as a step forward. If yahoo were 1/10th the size and made similar products it might make sense, but on a cheap day yahoo is a 15 billion dollar buyout, and is more like a 20-25 billion buyout to get complete ownership, that's a shitload of money for a huge big outfit and culture that wouldn't really fit with Apple.

MS is a whole other ballgame. Merging yahoo and hotmail would give them a huge base to rival google with, and would bring them into a noticeable share of the search market, and give them a full on portal to the web that they've failed at miserably. All of the things wrong with yahoo for apple apply to MS, but MS has fucked up all of those things enough that buying yahoo might actually look like an improvement over whatever they can manage.

Re:APPLE should buy them

[Ethanol-fueled]

All your fancy math aside, I can state simply that Apple would not acquire Yahoo because that would cheapen their brand. The layperson assumes that everything Apple makes is totally proprietary, top-notch, justifying a higher price. Apple's purchase of Yahoo would be a Frankenstein-esque grafting of some ugly diseased limb. People will lose respect for Apple because they will believe that Apple is "going plebian" and becoming uncool.

I am not an Apple fanboy and will use any chance I can to ridicule Apple and its users, but I'm only being straight-up here. I know the feeling personally, because I lost a lot of respect for Java (then still overseen by SUN) when they started shoehorning the Yahoo Toolbar in with Java installs. The move was cheap, tacky, and a huge disappointment overall.

Re:APPLE should buy them

[DerekLyons]

Otherwise, which Yahoo! services are so valuable to make it worth adding another redundant search engine to the ones they already have? Hotjobs? Yahoo! Groups? Which ones?

Yahoo! Groups are widely used, as is Yahoo! mail. It's finance pages are widely used as well.
 
But one of the real jewels in their crown, and one most people don't associate with Yahoo - is Flickr. There's a huge community there, and it's not only one of the most powerful and fully featured photosharing sites... There's an extensive community of discussion boards as well. (These are nearly unique among the major photosharing sites AFAIK.)

Users

[Ethanol-fueled]

Microsoft would just be buying Yahoo's users.

Which is a shame, because yahoo voice chat was the best trolling on the internet. There was a bug where, if you got ignored, you could simply leave the room and come back. Those who ignored you couldn't see your posts, but they could hear your audio.

My drunken friends and I spent many a night trolling the Christian chat rooms with pornographic recordings. Here's how we'd do it:

First, every Christian chat room had its own resident loudmouth who would spout bible verses all night without relinquishing the mic. We would get him off by starting a feedback loop, placing our microphone directly in front of our speakers, causing the feedback to be fed through the windbag's speakers into his mic. The feedback would be so horrible that the guy would get off the mic.

Next, with our mic at our speakers, we would play pornographic audio snippets from porn movies. The whole room would be exposed to those awful recordings and stir up into a frenzy of anger and disgust("I have kids in here listening to this with me!") and we would sit back and laugh, porn blaring, as they ignored us one by one. Then, thanks to the aforementioned bug, we'd leave the room and go back in.

The best part was when some asshole tried to grab the mic and wouldn't relinquish it, but he wouldn't turn his speakers down so even if the whole room had ignored us, our porno-audio was still going through his speakers, into his mic, and being fed back into the room. Since he was so desperate to keep control of the mic, he lost either way, and the room was forced to hear pornographic audio.

Finally, they would get smart and turn their speakers off. Then the person on the mic would start singing while the rest of the chat room fumed and ranted around him. It's like when a kid hears something he doesn't want to, cups his hands over his ears, and goes, "la-la-la-la-LAAAAAA."

It was classic.

Yahoo is still relevent

[Soupster]

If you look at their quarterly reports Yahoo is quite profitable actually, and they are still the third most used website on the internet. In terms of user minutes they trail only slightly behind Facebook (#1) and Google (#2).

Additionally, their patents have separate value that can be quite powerful if used offensively, as all the smartphone manufacturers are doing now.

Yahoo! should merge with...

[drgroove]

Yahoo! should merge with Ask, AOL, and Lycos. They could call themselves That 90's Web Company.

Already a done deal

[Anonymous Coward]

A co-worker of mine is leaving to join Yahoo on Monday. He was told yesterday that within three months he will be a Microsoft Employee. He is not best pleased as he is an Open Source devotee. He is talking with a lawyer today to see if he can walk out of the contract.

I talked to an Analyst yesterday and he says that MS are getting Yahoo on the cheal. Like $1B cheap. The rest of the money is coming from Microsoft's usual investment partners, Silverlake Capital and a Canadian company(forgot the name at the moment).

I think the model for this is the MS/Nokia deal. From my pals at Nokia, it seems that MS rules in everything but name. Many of the very scandinavian working practices are slated for being consigned to the history books.

Re:I have $5

[hairyfeet]

Everyone makes jokes but they seem to miss the big picture. I can tell you from my position running my little shop that the VAST majority of the common folk that walk through my door have Yahoo.com set as their home page. Sure we geeks think its a cluttered mess, but they love it. Also Yahoo Mail last I checked had the highest numbers of in use accounts of ANY other Webmail including Gmail.

That is a HELL of a lot of eyeballs one can ads for and advertise your other products to. If the sweaty monkey can get it at a decent price instead of the scary billions he originally offered that Yang was frankly insane not to take? Well then it might actually be a win for the monkey.

Of course if it is like everything else that dumbass touches he will completely cock the whole thing up, either ruin it with some horrible "Windows Live 2.0 Web Cloud Powered By Bing" kinda bullshit, or he'll let his Apple fetish go nuts and it'll be some bad iTunes style skinning. Ballmer seems bound and determined to fuck the company right into the ground and I'm sure he'll figure out a way to bone this. if I didn't know better I'd think Google had sent him as a mole to destroy the company, but sadly he is just "Apple Pepsi CEO" levels of stupid. See his desperate trying to push a cell phone GUI onto Windows in the vain hope he can get developers to make apps for a Windows tablet nobody actually wants for an example.

BTW if anybody hasn't tried the Win 8 developer preview its out now for free and you really should give it a go. its got epic fail written on it so deep you're amazed it doesn't make your PC release a rancid shit smell when you run it.