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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."
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.
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?
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 Ask, AOL, and Lycos. They could call themselves That 90's Web Company.
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.
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.