Microsoft Looks To Refuel Talks With Yahoo 188
froggero1 writes "The New York Post is reporting that Microsoft wants to rekindle the takeover talks with Yahoo. According to the article, Yahoo! has repeatability turned away their offers, but Microsoft hopes that a lucrative 50 billion dollar offer will bring them back to the table. This move would increase Microsoft's web search market share to roughly 38%."
Not just grammar (Score:4, Informative)
From the FA:
The new approach follows an offer Microsoft made to acquire Yahoo! a few months ago, sources said. But Yahoo! spurned the advances of the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant. Wall Street sources put a roughly $50 billion price tag on Yahoo!.
Re:Too much? (Score:3, Informative)
Well duh, look at what website you are visiting. Thats like saying everything you heard about the United States on Al-Jazeera is bad so obviously they deserve to be blown up. Why dont you use it and try to develop your own opinions objectively rather than believing everything you read on an enourmously biased website? There are certainly good and bad elements to Vista, but if you are going to flame them it should at least be based on something better than reading a bunch of negative stuff on slashdot.
Re:Increase share? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:If Yahoo! is 38% of the market (Score:5, Informative)
This is an incorrect assumption in several ways. First Yahoo has 28% of Web searching, not 38%. The 38% number was for Yahoo and MS's combined share. The other way it is incorrect is the assumption that all Yahoo or Google or MS does is search, which is of course not true. The value of $50B was for the company, not for their Web search service.
of course google is overvalued... (Score:3, Informative)
However, value is not generally directly proportional to market share. There's lots of value associated with growth potential and being number 1 in a market...
Then again, there's always a limit to how many tulips [wikipedia.org] people want...
Re:holy crap (Score:3, Informative)
Re:holy crap (Score:4, Informative)
Re:holy crap (Score:3, Informative)
It's not a lot for Yahoo, but it's a lot for Microsoft. Yes, even Microsoft.
Despite their huge revenue and profits, Microsoft currently "only" has $25 billion [yahoo.com] in the bank. So they couldn't do a straight purchase of Yahoo, they'd have to do a stock swap and maybe some borrowing, which would be a merger rather than a takeover. (In fact, that's how I'm seeing it described in other news reports.) It wouldn't be MS swallowing up Yahoo and dictating who stays and who goes. It would be some of Yahoo and some of MS mixed together.
I can't see that this is what MS would want. This is not how they do business. They're not going to let some Yahoo schlub come in and take over Steve Ballmer's job, and they're not going to want a situation where Yahoo's Hotjobs division is suddenly leading the development of MS Office. But these are the kinds of weird things that happen in mergers.
I think it's more likely that they'll try to do some sort of exclusive search deal with them, where Yahoo searches are done through Windows Live. This would still be a huge deal because Yahoo's invested a lot in their search tech over the past few years (as has MS). So you're probably still talking a multi-billion dollar deal here. But it's one way the two companies could join forces against Google without an outright merger.
Re:Not just grammar (Score:3, Informative)
Re:holy crap (Score:4, Informative)