Yahoo Ends Talks With Microsoft, Embraces Google Instead 214
snydeq writes with a story from InfoWorld which says that "Yahoo has ended its talks with Microsoft and is instead nearing an agreement with Google. Yahoo's purported reason for breaking off the talks? That Microsoft was only interested in purchasing Yahoo's search business, not all of the company. 'Such a transaction would not be consistent with the company's view of the converging search and display marketplaces, would leave the company without an independent search business that it views as critical to its strategic future and would not be in the best interests of Yahoo stockholders,' the company said in a statement. The deal with Google allegedly involves Yahoo's search advertising business. The move likely will draw more ire from Icahn and may in fact remain part of the elaborate poker game between the two companies. Microsoft said this alternative transaction remains on the table and did not confirm that talks between it and Yahoo have concluded." Update: 06/12 23:58 GMT by T : CWmike writes "Just hours after saying it ended talks with Microsoft, Yahoo announced that it will start running advertising from Google alongside Yahoo search results. Yahoo expects the deal, which has a 10-year term, to generate $250 million to $450 million in operating cash flow during the first 12 months."
Re:LULZ (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not a MS supporter (or troll), that was an honest question...
Not surprising... (Score:5, Insightful)
And of course, it's highly plausible that this whole effort from Microsoft was intended solely to serve their own interests by creating the perception they were going to acquire, and they never intended to go through with it, for whatever arcane market reasons.
Programming is simple. Business is complicated.
Re:LULZ (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Carl Icahn (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, in what way has Paul Allen failed? Seems to me he's doing rather well for himself.
The smartest thing he ever did was get out of the running of Microsoft. I was always of the opinion he was an ok bloke.
Let me be the first to cry (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not surprising... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What Yahoo Wants? (Score:5, Insightful)
Together they will be unstoppable (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, god, no... (Score:5, Insightful)
My guess: No one. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm guessing that no one will win. Apparently no one has done even a little bit of creative thinking.
Re:LULZ (Score:2, Insightful)
If these were any other two companies... (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, imagine if Apple were trying to acquire, for instance Transmeta, (purely hypothetical) and offering a 45%+ premium. And Transmeta in response turned it down and set up internal policies to make generous severence payments to employees who chose to leave after the acquisition.
What do you call that? I call it gross breach of fiduciary duty to your stockholders. I am fortunately not a Yahoo stockholder, but if I was, I'd be pretty pissed about this.
Yahoo Needs Neither Microsoft Not Google (Score:-1, Insightful)
Re:LULZ (Score:5, Insightful)
That's about the only Yahoo! service that I still consider superior to Google's offerings.
Superficial reasoning aside, yes and no.
On one hand, a Goo-ho! would involve diluting the corporate culture of Google, risking it becoming less of a company that I look up to as an example of how to be successful and ethical. That would be bad. On the other hand, these two companies could actually mesh well when you consider WHAT they provide. The resulting conglomeration would have about the best of most of the 'big' web services that are offered out there.
A Yah-soft would just be the next interation of Microsoft Live! before it tanked yet again due to poor manaegment and a lack of any discernable goals other than "we need to be out there, doing... something!"
Re:Here's an idea (Score:5, Insightful)
QDOS -> MSDOS
MAC OS -> Windows
Spyglass -> IE
BSD TCPIP stack -> Spider stack -> Windows NT stack
JAVA -> J+ -> J#
Flash -> Silverlight
You must be REALLY new here!
Re:LULZ (Score:2, Insightful)
And plenty of other reasons...
Re:What Yahoo Wants? (Score:1, Insightful)
Jerry Yang knows this, hence the 2 reasons why he doesn't want to sell...
First, Yahoo does very little that Microsoft does as well (and given the quality and market share of Live Search, that doesn't count). That means Ballmer wants to buy his way into a new market. He wouldn't do that, with the approbation of Gates and the rest of the board, if they didn't think it would be worth ten times that in ten years. To Yang this confirms that selling now is a bad move.
Second, it means that pretty much all of yahoo is, in case of takeover by Microsoft, destined to be shutdown or put in hibernation like Hotmail. Of course he doesn't relish the idea of the company he started being destroyed in such a way.
Re:Oh, god, no... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:LULZ (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft tried as they always do to manipulate the market place and get themselves a sweatheart deal rather then playing a more "fair game" as fair as large cap market stock deals get anyway. They ended up souring the deal. I think it was bad business on their part. They should have made a fair offer and done the deal. Sure Yahoo got hurt more then Microsoft did but thats not what it was about. Microsoft really lost an oppertunity they wanted, no matter how the outsiders and small investors see it, the Microhoo fiasco was a failure of Microsoft's.
I don't know what Google gets outa Yahoo other then sheer mass. I don't think Yahoo represents the top drawer tech when compared with Google. Yes there is some good Yahoo technology that Google can assimilate easily, but its probably not worth what Google has to pay. The brand and portal offerings are of little value to Google becase theirs are already better. To Google's credit though they have gotten quite big and demonstrated from a leadership standpoint they can manage the mass. If you are going to tangle with an 800lb gorrilla like Microsoft, being a 600lb gorilla rather then the 500lb you already are might give you that little bit of extra inertia needed to prevent Microsoft from steam rolling you by tring to take the web proprietary again with dotNet, still more activeX, and silverlight.
Re:If these were any other two companies... (Score:2, Insightful)
What is this "gross breach of fiduciary duty" you speak of? Is that a legal thing?
Yang boarding a flight to the Caribbean with suitcases stuffed with cash would be one thing, thinking beyond a one time buyout deal is quite another.
From almost exactly a year ago: http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/9388783?f=related [cfo.com]
Suing a corporation for not selling their grandmothers for a nickel is an abuse of the legal system.
Re:LULZ (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you missed the main issue that deals with web marketing--a topic that most geeks on slashdot are not familiar with. The problem with Yahoo siding with Google is that it helps establish Google as the king of search and online advertising. All three services (Google, Yahoo, MSN) make a huge chunk if their revenue through online advertising and marketing services. Since Google will now have it's hands toying around with Yahoo, Google could just slowly eat away at Yahoo's margins or eventually buy them out. That would leave the last significant competitor as MSN which isn't even much of a competitor. The end result is basically a Google monopoly on web marketing until the next big disruptive marketing tech comes along.
Google's online marketing market share is already so significant that most web marketing firms won't even touch Yahoo or MSN networks because the effort is simply not worth the return. But now you say if I go through Google I'll also get a piece of Yahoo? Big win for Google.
In this situation, I think Yahoo honestly had a choice between two devils with different faces. They may have royally pissed off their shareholders with shrugging off MS, but they may keep their company alive for a little longer.
As far as my own opinion, I'm split. On one side as a consumer, I think there needs to be more web marketing competitors to compete with Google in order to maintain a healthy market. On the other hand I am a Google shareholder. I suppose in this case I win (and lose) either way.
Re:If these were any other two companies... (Score:5, Insightful)
They take no pride in the company in which they have stock.
They don't care about employees or customers.
They have huge great dollar signs in their eyes and cannot see past them.
They would gladly fuck it to death for all the money they can and then dispose of the corpse.
That, my friend, is 'fiduciary duty'. Fuck 'em to death, wring the cash out then wash your hands and move to the next target to suck the life out of.
Re:LULZ (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, it would be much, much better.
What we dislike about Microsoft is not that it is big and powerful but that it releases poor quality products and destroys its competition using monopolistic tactics.
Google, on the other hand, supports Free and open-source software, has excellent products that geeks love, is concerned about seamless co-operation and integration of all web services (even ones that they don't own) and wins by having the better product, and constantly improving it.
Re:LULZ (Score:3, Insightful)
In this case, Yahoo! made a NON-EXCLUSIVE deal with Google. This isn't monopolistic. Google also has a number of different deals with AOL. Google and Yahoo once had various deals with each other. Google also has a deal with Mozilla. Businesses do deals all the time, but yet they compete strongly.
Look at Google and eBay. There is a lot of competition going on there, when it comes to PayPal and Google Checkout. Yet, eBay continues to shovel tons of money towards Google. Why? Because it is beneficial to them. They need advertising, Google provides advertising.
Do a search on Google for the word "search"... chances are you will see an advertisement for live.com. So, Microsoft is also shoveling tons of money towards Google.
This isn't Yahoo! buying Google and this isn't Google buying Yahoo!. Google and Yahoo! are merely striking a deal. Yahoo! will feature Google ads in their search. Yahoo!'s search engine will still be powered by their own algorithms. They won't lose (or gain) search share as a result. They'll just make more money in advertising.
Google and Yahoo! will also be working to get their IM clients to work together. This can only benefit the web community at large.
It is also a non-exclusive deal, which basically means Yahoo! can strike similar agreements with whomever they choose, even Microsoft.
It DOES make Yahoo! less attractive as a BUYOUT option for Microsoft, because this would mean that Microsoft would be buying something which benefits Google, which probably wouldn't sit well with the way Microsoft does business. However, it does nothing to dilute Yahoo!'s role in the market, nor Google's role in the market. It simply gives Yahoo! more money to compete with.
Re:If these were any other two companies... (Score:1, Insightful)
In this particular case, Yahoo is losing and they have no credible plan to "win". The acquisition offer from Microsoft represented a way to win (being eaten whole by a large rival is considered winning), which made investors happy. Yahoo, in turn, decided it would rather continue losing than team up with someone they didn't like. This, of course, made investors unhappy, because they don't like to lose. Today, Yahoo basically conceeded defeat by teaming up with the current leader, dooming themselves to be an also-ran.
Re:LULZ (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is why they were, you know, found guilty?
Hendrix had potential to be more (Score:4, Insightful)
I have several years of traditional music education under my belt and I'm a simply lousy (and then some) musician. No natural rhythm, and I could never improv. at all. I'm also slightly tone deaf to certain ranges of the register. However, programming is my natural talent. I 'learned' more about it from messing around and gut instinct than I really do in class. Then there's system/network administration; I can learn it and do it with a bit of effort, but I'm neither simply lousy or gifted at it.
I think this is how most people are. You either are gifted and only get much better with time, manage to be sufficient, or are lousy regardless of effort. It seems that musicians who are naturally gifted are relatively rare and (if they don't get in to jazz, where talent goes on to play and never get recognition) stand out amongst the rest quickly.
Re:Not surprising... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:LULZ (Score:5, Insightful)
porl