Microsoft Going After Yahoo! Again 218
Corrupt writes "Microsoft on Monday released a letter that supports investor activist Carl Icahn's efforts to unseat Yahoo's board, as well as confirming its interest to explore a bid to buy the entire company, or just its search assets, with a new board."
Lets get a count (Score:3, Insightful)
Who here find this surprising? Didn't think so.
And we are supposed to believe that MS can create competitive products? It doesn't look much like that. sad.
Almost Seems Desperate - Doesnt It? (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft is showing how scared it is of losing the online search battle. Maybe because it realizes that it is also losing ground rapidly in software.
The nice thing about Rome is that we still have lots of pretty statues...too bad the same can't be said about old code.
Re:If at first you don't succeed.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Give it up already (Score:3, Insightful)
My one question.... (Score:2, Insightful)
for goodness sake, WHY? Seriously. Does Microsoft really think Yahoo will help them? It'll just make a bloated conglomerate even more bloated with extraneous staff and duplicate job junctions. Sure, some of those will be weeded out, but dammit, when will MS get the point that they don't need to be BIGGER, they need to be LEANER and more efficient in doing things. Get rid of redundant redundancy. Stop having 12 guys work on the Start menu. And you wonder why their products are so bloody crappy now. Will they ever learn?
Re:If at first you don't succeed.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft shareholders, on the other hand, should be screaming bloody murder.
Re:Um (Score:2, Insightful)
No, but i find most of the worlds population being greedy pricks. While im no communist i do think there are more important things to our society than money.
Yahoo already peaked (Score:5, Insightful)
Yahoo peaked when it released Yahoo Mail. They haven't really done anything new or innovative or even relevant since.
Re:Um (Score:5, Insightful)
It should be burning a hole in his pocket. Shareholders get antsy when companies hold on to a huge cash reserve without any plans for what they're going to do with it. That cash should be used to grow the company or should be returned to the shareholders in the form of a dividend. Having it sit in the bank isn't helping the shareholders at all.
Microsoft used to say they needed their big cash reserves to fight off giant lawsuits, especially the anti-trust suits. Now that the government has rolled over and given up, though, MS is going to have to come up with something to do with all that cash. Buying up other companies is a popular way to do that.
Re:If at first you don't succeed.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, do something about it then... Switch from Google to search.yahoo.com and make it easier to compete with Google. Google is the (traditional) Microsoft of the web, assimilating and dominating search.
wtf is an "investor activist"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also Icahn and his ilk have no interest in real "investment", he simply wants to boost the stock price long enough to dump it. They don't understand or care that the two companies are a horrible match technology wise, management wise, and corporate culture wise and that a merger between the two would leave Yahoo an empty shell a year later.
Apparently when you are a sufficiently large publicly traded corporation it is expected that you adopt short-sighted suicidal tendencies.
Re:If at first you don't succeed.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'm glad I don't own MSFT (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:If at first you don't succeed.... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the silliest thing ever to say. You could just as easily say, "in a privately held company, the only thing that matters are the owners." You might say one is better than the other, but it's a pointless argument that totally depends on the situation. The mafia can be the owner of a private company, they can't be the owner of a public company, and I would much rather have shareholders coming after me than the mafia.
In any company, a lot of things matter: shareholders or owners, employees, customers, business partners....the fact is if you are depending on ANY company to "look out" for your best interest, you are highly naive. That's pretty much how life is, everyone is looking out for their own interest.
Re:Fortune's take: Not Compting w/ Google on Tech (Score:4, Insightful)
As I said, Gmail and Google Maps took Ajax and web-based-apps to a new level, crushing the competition with better technology. I didn't say Google invented the internet, or even invented Ajax.
Google innovated in these areas by applying creative uses of new technology, and that's why it's Google Maps not Mapquest, and Gmail not Yahoo Mail or Hotmail that everyone uses these days. Google deserves every ounce of credit for these.
And yes, every innovation comes back to some individual or purchased company or whatever who actually sat there and wrote the code. A company (Google in this case) promoted and marketed and guided these excellent ideas and helped turn them into successes. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that process.
I've seen plenty of companies take good people and good ideas, and instead of recognizing and promoting them, they demoralize the individuals and pervert the best of ideas into an abomination. This is often done in the name of "marketing" (check out ICQ's massive failure in AOL's hands), or copying the existing market instead of doing something original (last company I worked for wouldn't even consider doing anything other than directly copying features from the market leader).
A company that recognizes and promotes innovative ideas deserves all the credit they can get.
Trying to tank, not trying to buy (Score:4, Insightful)
At this point, considering the approach, I strongly suspect that Microsoft is less interested in purchasing Yahoo! as they are in just removing Yahoo! from the field.
This sort of corporate business makes me weep for our entire culture. =/
Re:If at first you don't succeed.... (Score:4, Insightful)
But a US corporation has to put their shareholders interests above all else mandated by law. Lots of things matter but customers, employees, partners, etc all play second and third sheet music with the shareholder.
Re:Yahoo already peaked (Score:2, Insightful)
You mean like Yahoo Zimbra [zimbra.com], Yahoo Shine [yahoo.com], or even Yahoo Widgets [yahoo.com]?
Or even Yahoo OpenID [yahoo.com]
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Yahoo already peaked (Score:3, Insightful)
Flickr and Yahoogroups were companies purchased by Yahoo! !innovation.
Re:If at first you don't succeed.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Google is the (traditional) Microsoft of the web
It's not. The lock-in effect is missing, plain and simple.
Re:If at first you don't succeed.... (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with silverlight is that it is not a necessary product. This is proven year after year as we have not had a need for it, hence it didn't exist.
What silverlight is, is a monopoly corporation's attempting to nasty up the playing field by using their monopoly in one field to gain a monopoly in another.
It isn't bringing about new features or better programming. It's about the same with a little bit here different and a little bit there. Maybe it is good for programmers but the programmers only need make what the customers want and what we want is what we have.
Re:If at first you don't succeed.... (Score:3, Insightful)
But it's pretty much every week that I see someone write that corporations are legally required to think about shareholders first.
As with so many of the problems in the US today, I assign the blame to the stupidity of the mob. A person can be smart; people are stupid.
And unfortunately, I can't think of any way human nature can be fixed.