Is Microsoft just Screwing with Yahoo's Mind? 209
The Narrative Fallacy writes "This week Cringely offers up a speculative piece asserting that Microsoft might not really care if its bid to buy Yahoo succeeds or not — Bill Gates just wants to disrupt Yahoo and poach the company's employees. 'Microsoft's offer for Yahoo has thrown that company and several others into a tizzy. Yahoo can't be getting much work done, that's for sure ... Redmond's real goal may be simply to poach people from Yahoo, and this deal could help them do just that.' Cringley says there is plenty of precedent for Microsoft's behavior — Microsoft's bids for Borland and for Intuit back in the 1990s sent both companies into a tailspin. 'A failed Microsoft bid, even one involving a termination fee, could lead to horrific results for the company. Remember that Yahoo is staggering here while Intuit was at the top of its market and its game.'"
Re:Treading Water (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Treading Water (Score:3, Informative)
otherwise, just to give you a hint "record quarter".
(Sorry, this kind of fud just doesnt work against microsoft. you really have to actually _do_ something if you want to change the status quo)
Re:Stock price (Score:1, Informative)
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=YHOO [yahoo.com]
Yahoo has gone down a bit since the announcement.
Re:Since when was business in the USA... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Treading Water (Score:2, Informative)
You are right in suggesting that new products have not caused that growth rate to accelerate beyond expectations (until recently). But when your earnings grow by a Google every year, it's pretty damn hard to turn the corner yet again.
Re:Treading Water (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not the one who needs to grow up here, kid. You obviously hold some kind of a misguided grudge against an entire corporation - "stupid human nature" indeed.
Re:Why its not a repeat of Intuit or Borland ... (Score:5, Informative)
. This is what happened to Borland - at one point, Borland owned the programming languagess market, with a 66% market share - more than Microsoft and everyone else combined. Then they went nuts. "Desktop / Professional / Enterprise" versions of compilers were one fo the first signs that rot was setting in. So was the buying and selling of WordPerfect and dBase. The dBase acquisition made sense - it let them compete directly with CA-Clipper. Dumping it later on didn't.
Borland's demise began on two very distinct and different fronts. The cause of one of them rests squarely on their shoulders, the second was pure MS evil.
1. Borland deciding to get into the applications market was the most supremely stupid move it ever made. Paradox with its obscure and somewhat strange "Answer Table" model broke down on large data sets and was generally to strange for a lot of people to deal with. Other then that it was a pretty good database. It's main competition at the time were two dBase from Ashton-Tate and DataEase. dBase had a great language but had a pretty low end database engine. Indexes were not dynamic, and if you packed a datafile, you were in re-index hell. DataEase had a built in screen builder, a sreaming fast databse engine, a very SQL like language, a report writer that was pretty damn nice, easy to use and would crank out reports like mad. Unfortunately they bet everything on OS/2 and Presentation Manager because at the time that was where the MS/IBM strategy was heading, then MS pulled the plug and well the rest as they say is history.
Quatro was an insanely wonderful spreadsheet product that was eating both Lotus's and Excel's lunch. It had a native GUI mode, perfect WYSIWYG and was lighting fast. It could handle multiple large spreadsheets, linking, all the fun stuff we enjoy today, and then Jim Manzy, that fuckwad from Lotus Development decided that the only way he could stave off the Quatro juggernaut was to go to court. The infamous look and feel lawsuit that came within a breath of putting Borland out of business. The filed suit in Boston and it looked like Borland was done for, then in the end Borland prevailed, but not until it had spent almost everything defending the suit. To this day I still want to find Jim Manzy in a dark alley and have a chat with him,
2. So anyone remember OWL??? The Object Windows Library? Pretty much up until then if you wanted to write windows programs you had to deal with the bare Windows API. If you had ever used it you knew it was a miserable experience. Many of the calls were very difficult to deal with, at best, and you had to re-invent a lot of things just to make your software work, Borland realized this and did something that changed windows development forever. They took the windows API and wrapped up in a very neat, clean, object based interface. Suddenly writing windows programs became some that was no longer am arcane bith of magic, and pure dumb luck. Microsoft, instead of going WOW, this company is driving TONS of programmers to windows they decided to counter with MFC and of course they really shit the bed. The first versions of MFC were simply awful, bordering on unusable, hell no one at SM would even use them. Meanwhile Borland kept refining OWL, they even had a CUI counterpart called turbo-vision, now called FreeVision as it was open sourced. OWL was being adopted by everyone and their grandmother. Borlands Language products were being used to drive windows development. The integrated IDE, all that stuff you take for granted today was ALL Borland. Up until this time Borland had licensed all the right bits from MS to handle things like integrated debugging, software profiling, really cool stuff within windows and they were flying high. Turbo C, Turbo C++, Turbo Pascal for windows were just climbing the charts. The reviews were rave and Borland was making money hand over fist and developers, for probably the first time ever, had really GREAT integrated tools to create grea
Re:Stock price (Score:3, Informative)
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=YHOO&t=3m/ [yahoo.com]
Yahoo had a sharp spike up at the takeover announcement and Microsoft went down
Re:Why its not a repeat of Intuit or Borland ... (Score:4, Informative)
'That so? Read on please... OWL [wikipedia.org]
Re:My biggest fear (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Treading Water (Score:4, Informative)
In 1974, Paul Allen and Bill Gates wrote the first microcomputer Basic interpreter on a PDP-8 minicomputer for an Intel 8080 microprocessor emulator.
MITS licensed MBASIC for the Altair in late 1975, and Micro-Soft was born. By the end of 1976, over ten thousand Altair computers were sold with either the original 4K or a newly expanded 8K MBASIC. Micro-Soft's work on the 8K version was spurred by a new player, Commodore Business Machines, and its Personal Electronic Transactor (PET), which debuted in mid-1976 with a licensed version of what was now called MBASIC 2.0. Early in 1978, Tandy Corporation licensed MBASIC 2.0 for its TRS-80 Model 1 Level II and called it Level II BASIC. At the same time, Tandy cross-licensed Level II BASIC to Apple, so the same MBASIC was running on virtually every microcomputer of any significance. ComputerSource [computersourcemag.com]
Re:Treading Water (Score:2, Informative)
While that's strictly accurate, they did buy a tool for building task-specific customised Windows shells by dragging controls from a palette and dropping them onto a form, called at various stages, Tripod then Ruby, from Alan Cooper. they then glued a modified version of QuickBasic into it to create version 1 of VB. Cooper's original Tripod/Ruby could have multiple languages plugged into it, and he anticipated C as the main one. So while they didn't buy the VB language, they did buy the concept and the first version of the IDE.
Here's how Cooper tells the story [cooper.com]