Tellme Founder Tells Yahoo Not to Worry Over Microsoft Takeover

Tellme founder and previous Yahoo co-founder, Mike McCue hasn't spoken to past-partner Jerry Yang since the Microsoft takeover bid for Yahoo, but he wanted to let his friend know that being acquired by Microsoft isn't such a terrible proposition. "After being assured that Tellme would be able to retain its Silicon Valley office, identity and quirky culture, McCue negotiated an $800 million sale to Microsoft and agreed to stay on as general manager. It's a decision that he says he doesn't regret 10 months into the marriage. 'We are pretty much doing everything we were doing before - just a lot more of it,' said McCue, 40. Because of the vast differences in size, the Tellme deal obviously isn't an apples-to-apples comparison to Microsoft's proposed $40 billion acquisition of Yahoo, which contends it's worth even more money despite a two-year earnings slump."

I was in a MSFT acquisition

[Anonymous Coward]

They told us we could keep our independence but almost immediately a VP decided we should be assimilated.

Re:Given Yahoo's assistance in Totalitarian China.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oddly enough the original poster's comment had two sentences, the second of which was a general note about the effect of money. I simply wanted to point out that getting on a high horse doesn't have much effect when you're covered in shit yourself already. The US government and probably every single person on slashdot helps the Chinese government grow and maintaining it's power. We give it money, we give it economic growth, we give it technological progress and we all ignore it's continual humanitarian abuses. We argue that this is better in the long term ,we argue that we are actually helping the Chinese people and so on.

Nonetheless every large company is China has probably had one government order or another requesting information on it's workers, or on it's customers or wiretaps or whatever. The exact same thing is done in the US, the police sometimes request things from companies and companies give that information up. If your company does business in China it can either follow it's laws or not do business there, no one seems to mind the former as long as they can save some money (including likely every single slashdot poster when they buy computer parts).

Re:Tellme

[TaoPhoenix]

I dunno about popular.
But I know of them, because part of their service line is to do Directory Assistance matches which gleefully tells you they are "powered by Tellme".

Mike McCue did not co-found Yahoo

[disassembled]

Mike McCue is not a co-founder of Yahoo. Prior to starting Tellme in 1999, he founded a company called Paper Software, which was subsequently bought by Netscape, but he was never directly involved with Yahoo.

The article is admittedly ambiguous about this point--it introduces Jerry Yang as a co-founder of Yahoo, and in the process, it inadvertently implies that he co-founded it with McCue.

Re:Tellme?

[Anne Thwacks]

It was a very long time ago, but the essence of it was that they claimed to be a low cost ISP, with free bundled modem. When in fact the modem was a lame 2400 baud thing when I was already operating 56k, and the "internet" they offered was a walled garden, which you could easily break out of, but if you did, you were billed at a hideous rate without warning, so that I ended up with huge bills.

In short, their business model relied on deceptive practices, and overcharging. I recall endless bills for things which I had just clicked on, and was unaware would cost me.

I was not young and naieve, but came from a background of Usenet and Fidonet, and saw no reason why this stuff should be chargeable.

Cancellation was a chargeable offence too: you were tied to a lengthy contract.

Re:Maybe, Maybe Not

[Mark_in_Brazil]

If you believe that Microsoft is buying Yahoo because MSN's content is shit poor, then the content people are safe. The engineers and IT people become redundant as Yahoo moves over to a Microsoft-based back end. (For those who think that's impossible, remember that Microsoft moved Hotmail from BSD to Windows 2k with relative efficiency.)

I agree with the parent post in general, and even this point isn't bad, except for the "relative efficiency" part, even with the built-in "relative" disclaimer. Not only were there problems with the migration to Win2K (including a statement in 2001 that the migration had been completed, which was later retracted), but we also have to remember that Microsoft tried really hard to migrate Hotmail to Windows NT and failed. Microsoft acquired HoTMaiL in 1997, but couldn't migrate to NT at all, and only managed to make the Win2K migration 4 years after the acquisition. Since Microsoft had stated publicly that Hotmail was going to be migrated to NT, it's pretty easy to look at the whole story and say "ouch."

I remember reading some internet columnist talking about the failed NT migration in 1999 or so, and I just found a description with references at the Wikipedia page on Hotmail. Specifically, the development history [wikipedia.org] part and in the footnotes [wikipedia.org].

It occurs to me now that Microsoft must have really believed the NT migration would not be hard, or the public statements about it before it was done would not have been made. The recent internal Microsoft e-mail exchange about the meaning of "Vista Ready" shows me that there are still a lot of decision-makers at Microsoft who really don't understand where their product sits in technical terms. They know its market position, but they don't appear know the real technical differences between Windows and other OSes.

Re:Tellme?

[jshazen]

I have mod points, but rather than mod parent *un*informative, I thought I'd explain. You're either misremembering the company that you're talking about, or there was some other company called Tellme that went out of business.

1) The Tellme that the article talks about is a phone automation company, not an ISP.
2) Until recently, Tellme has had clients in the Fortune 100, and has not charged individuals to use the service. (Tellme does have a *free* service (1-800-555-TELL) for the general public.)
3) Tellme was founded in 1999, significantly after win3.1 and 2400 bps modems.

Disclaimer: I work for Tellme (a Microsoft subsidiary), but my comments do not reflect any official opinion or policy.