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%."
If Yahoo! is 38% of the market (Score:2, Interesting)
then 100% = $132B
So why does Google [yahoo.com] have a market cap of $146 billion? That's more than 100% of the market value. Some numbers must be wrong here... likely Microsoft's offer is too shallow. Or is Google over valued?
Re:holy crap (Score:3, Interesting)
And I don't think most of Yahoo's sites have been trending downwards, the exception being their search engine, of course.
Re:Too much? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well here are a few good things about it:
-- Media Center is INCREDIBLE and unlike Myth, it works out of the box
-- Recording audio is SIMPLE, whereas in Linux, it can be a PITA with some audio chipsets
-- Hardware support for bleeding-edge hardware (and new-but-not-quite-bleeding-edge-any-more) is fairly good, unlike Linux
-- the new GUI sure is pretty (but on the other hand, Beryl on Linux is FANTASTIC. KDE + Beryl + Vista-like skin is orgasmic. Beryl provides everything in Linux that Microsoft promised for the Windows GUI but dropped the ball on)
And, well, that's about it. Why DON'T I run Vista, and why do I choose Linux?
-- Freedom. I do what I want, when I want, with any media I purchase (mainly DVDs, transcoding them for viewing on my PocketPC or remotely from work)
-- Freedom. Microsoft cannot illegally revoke my right of first sale on Linux due to too many hardware upgrades, or at whim.
-- Explorer SUCKS. Give me konqueror's tabbed file browsing and KDE's KIO slaves. fish:// makes working on remote boxes a breeze.
-- cmd.exe SUCKS (and so does SFU and monad/powershell is better but not great). bash rocks.
-- *nix is inherently secure, and not an easily-bypassed [cancel] [allow] hack.
All Microsoft needs to do to win me back as a customer is:
-- Quit treating paying customers as criminals, especially since it does not stop "pirates" at ALL (read: eliminate activation)
-- Make it EASY to install an alternate desktop such as KDE, replacing the crappy Explorer
-- Ease up on the DRM, especially since EVERY Windows alternative, including OS X, are becoming increasingly lax in that regard. DRM should protect the customer's assets from vandals, not block customers from using their own legally-purchased belongings as they see fit.
Re:Increase share? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a scary thought (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Well- Yahoo would have to talk (Score:3, Interesting)
Think of the business argument like this- Why should I buy Windows to run my business if Microsoft doesn't run Windows to run their's?
A long time ago, MS ran their accounting department on AS/400s as the story goes, and other F500 companies where pointing this fact to the MS sales people. MS then, again as the story goes, tried to move everything over to a Windows based system, and failed. Failed horribly, and to the point where MS had to make a tough choice- run AS/400 systems and run the company or not and not get payroll and bills out on time. What did they do? Created a company to run the accounting department systems, moved everyone over to that new company, and then to the outside world it appeared that MS was indeed eating their own dog food.
Re:What do you think? (Score:3, Interesting)
For the better part of three decades they have also been sucessful at doing the opposite. Aren't you one of those people who accuse them of buying everything they sell and not "innovating" at all?
Hotmail was cool [...] loading it with adds and making it suck.
I'm sorry, but Hotmail was not cool. And yes, they made it suck, but then all the free webmails of the day sucked. I remember Altavista mail well. It was GMail that first bucked that trend. This is not a "M$" trait by any stretch of the imagination.
Amazon used to have a good search, then along came M$
No, I'm sorry. Amazon used to suck rocks. Now that they run on top of Live, it sucks less. Seriously, Live is really not that bad, but I'm sure you've never even loaded it.
Is a picture emerging here?
Sure, XBox is not selling and neither is Vista. All of Microsoft's product have been "losers", which is why they are where they are today. Their development tools suck. Their office suite barely sells. The picture is clear. Thanks for bringing that up.
Re:Which will ruin it and waste the first 50 billi (Score:2, Interesting)
If I had to rate the links on a scale of 1 to 10 based on relevance, Google would get 10, Yahoo would get 5 and MSN would get 2.
Re:indeed this says a lot (Score:3, Interesting)
erm I think you've got that wrong. MSN was meant to replace the Internet, at least that is what the Microsoft Sales Idiots tried to convince me around 1994. The exact term they used was "MSN will bury the Internet in 6 months". The idea at Microsoft was that centralized and controlled networks were the future, think France's Minitel mating with AOL. You've got to remember that this was around the time Bill Gates tried the vision thing with his "Road Ahead" book and ended up looking like some lamer who just didn't get it.