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."
I'm glad I don't own MSFT (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought about buying stock in Microsoft, but this behavior appears to be out of spite rather than a sound business decision.
Microsoft buying Yahoo would only have made sense if they never had MSN in the first place. It is buying a competitor to compete with its own products and if they intend to only shut it down or merge it with MSN, its only going to bleed massive amounts of money from MSFT in the process.
The smartest decision would be to let Yahoo die on its own and focus on more "fresh" markets or ones that is truly their bread and butter like Xbox, Office, and Windows. There is no need for it to dominate a market that is firmly entrenched in Google by aquring Yahoo. If nothing else it only helps Google and people who are short selling MSFT.
Death of Yahoo (Score:2, Interesting)
If yahoo would sell its search business i seriously doubt it will survive many months. I dont think Carl Icahn will let a single dime from any eventual sale of the search business go anywhere but straight into the stock owners pockets. Just like Google Yahoo cant gather any users without its search business regardless of what services they might have.
If they sell Yahoo it has to be in whole or they will waste the total value of the company for a very small one-time gain.
As a computer user i would really like it if Microsoft go out and buy Yahoo, just to see Microsofts faces when every single user jumps ship to Google instead
Re:If at first you don't succeed.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, it's great for the shareholders. Unfortunately, it's a disaster for the internet and its users. Flickr with Silverlight? No thanks. Yahoo Mail -> Live conversion? No thanks. Replacing YUI with .NET AJAX? No thanks.
Re:So, is this a concession... (Score:3, Interesting)
It would be a huge acquisition and could help build a lot of momentum if they can also get some good new stuff out.
Another MS search addendum (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems like Microsoft is preparing to go without yahoo: http://www.ovum.com/news/euronews.asp?id=7136 [ovum.com]
Fortune's take: Not Compting w/ Google on Tech (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I'm glad I don't own MSFT (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I found it surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
A company with Microsoft's resources should be able to come up with a better business plan than a buy-in. I think they're impatient, for some reason not yet disclosed.
It's all about Google.
If I were an MS strategist, Google's search business wouldn't scare me. If you lost sleep every time somebody made money doing something technological you'd go mad.
I'd be a little more concerned with Google's foray into online office suites, but I'd be fairly confident that wasn't a serious problem in the short to mid term.
The thing I'd be freaked about is Google's casual way of generating APIs for its popular services. That hits Microsoft where it lives.
This is a relatively low cost, low risk game for Google. Nobody expects them to provide soup-to-nuts service for all your IT needs; they're just throwing API shit against the wall. If it sticks, good for Google, bad for MS; if t doesn't, MS feels no pain, but neither does Google. It's just another interesting idea from Google.
This is like assymetrical warfare: MS is the conventional force, and Google is the guerilla force. Google chooses when and where to stike, and if it fails it doesn't cost them much. Tactical failures can even be strategic victories if they provoke a costly response. From MS's standpoint, it is necessary to limit Google's ability to strike when and where it will, and get away without much loss no matter the outcome. One thing you can do is start to poach on Google's engineering talent; taking people out of a team is disruptive. Another thing you can do is try to hurt them in places where they live, so you want them so focused at keeping their ad revenue flowing that they can't do anything else.
Google's strategic weakness is that it doesn't provide full solutions. It is an interesting technology company, not a product company. That's good for MS because once Google (or anybody else) provides a complete replacement for Office, Exchange and Sharepoint, bad things are going to happen to MS.
Gaining control of Yahoo makes sense for several reasons. First, it keeps them from cooperating with Google, which is the opposite of what MS wants. MS wants Google to have to work harder to get ad revenue, not less. Second, Yahoo is a product company, like MS; it could be the first to offer the complete, MS free product stack. Equally bad, Yahoo could goad Google into upgrading its products so they look more like a viable replacement for MS to enterprise customers.
The picture MS would prefer is Google struggling to maintain ad revenues, and facing a steep uphill battle in product adoption and API mindshare when it looks at MS dominated product areas.
Re:I'm glad I don't own MSFT (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, I'd like an explanation as to what MS gets by buying Yahoo. Are they going to use any particular technology, or are they just trying to buy the userbase? If the latter, then it makes me wonder how much of the userbase will stay when everything is converted to MS brands.
Like, if Microsoft ditches the Yahoo webmail and implements their own, ditches the chat client and makes Yahoo users use the MSN chat client, then how many users stick around? Or does Microsoft leave all of that intact?
I'm not ready to judge whether it would be good or bad, but I'd be interested to know what Microsoft intends to do with Yahoo once they own them. Or maybe they don't even know? I sometimes think that might be the case with some of these buy-outs, that they don't have a sound business case for them. Like maybe it's an semi-emotional decision, that they're hoping that by buying more people and having a bigger presence, they're less likely to fail regardless of what services they're offering.
Re:They don't need to buy Yahoo! (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe they can get BayStar to help fund Icahn's take over and make it look like someone else is behind it. Or maybe help by funding a new SCO company looking to get into search engine technology and advertising.
Microsoft has dozens of techniques to undermine Yahoo but if they drive away yahoo customers, will they want to go to Microsoft or Google? Maybe they've got a No-Go-Google feature planned for a Vista update. One thing is certain, this now shows that Steve Balmer will not rest until Yahoo is no longer a Google partner. IMO
LoB
Re:Almost Seems Desperate - Doesnt It? (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually Microsoft is down in overall usage. Used to be near 95 % not long ago and by the end of this year it looks like Microsoft will be down under 90%.
Of course the biggest winner is Apple and its Mac. However percentage wise the biggest winner is Linux.
The numbers are Microsoft about 90+ Apple 7+ and Linux 1. (the rest is various smaller operating systems like Solaris HP-UX and mobile devices)
Given that Microsoft won't come out with a new operating system until something like early 2010 it will mean that the alternatives should be able to actually double their part of the overall market and move Microsoft down to 80-85 % of the overall market.
Re:No risk? (Score:5, Interesting)
Are you really saying there's no risk to Google's innovation?
I'm not sure how you get there from what I said. The driving strategic factor behind acquiring Yahoo is constraining Google.
MS looks at Google, and sees its younger self. MS was built around the desktop OS cash cow. Having a cash cow means having room to fail. MS often failed, but used its money to keep strategic projects alive until they could kill the competition. Google might not have the swaggering, mercilessly brutal image that MS in the bad old days did, but make no mistake, they're an aggressive competitor. Worse yet from MS's standpoint, Google has its own cash cow, and MS knows exactly how a cash cow can be used to enter new markets.
Why oh why is Google mucking around with office suites? Because with a cash cow, it's play money to them. As long as the money rolls in, nobody is going to complain. If online office suites turns into a big business well, jolly good, but they can afford to chalk it up as brainstorming. On the darker side, Office suites are a very serious business to Microsoft; it's one of Microsoft's cash cows and one of the pillars of its strategic power. It must be maddening to have a dominant player in the search market mess around in their core business.
Over the years, many MS competitors lost their ability to innovate because they were obsessed with MS, and now Google is doing the same to them. Is it intentional? You decide.
Re:If at first you don't succeed.... (Score:4, Interesting)
A US corporation does NOT have to put shareholder interest #1 by law. A US corporation is free to act against shareholder interest as established in the corporate charter. Plenty of "green" corporations have clauses about environmental responsibility in their charter that are detrimental to the profit interests of thre shareholders, yet this is not illegal.
Futhermore, it is not illegal to act against the interests of the shareholders. It can result in a civil liability to be decided in a tort case, but it is not against the law.
What do you think a partner is? It's an owner. It's obvious to me that you have *NO* idea wat you're talking about.
:)). Serving the shareholder (owner) means serving the customers and employees, within reason. Note that sharholder == owner.
As for customers, employees, etc being second or third fiddle to owners, most ownership knows that investing the right amount into customer and employee relationships literally pays dividends (for dividend-paying stocks
There are lots of problems with how joint-stock corporations operate, and I agree that things would be much nicer if they changed... but when owners demand crap, their companies produce crap. The problem is not really with the corporations' structure, the problem is with the owners (shareholders) of the corporations.
Rant as you will against corporations, it's people who make the decisions, the same as with any business.
You Obama folks should thank Jeri Ryan. (Score:3, Interesting)
Jeri Ryan was married to a former shoo-in for the U.S. Senate out of Illinois; a man who liked to show off his wife's amazing body at swingers clubs. She divorced him over it, and had their records sealed, but his original Senate opponent (Obama) filed suit to have the records opened. When the records were made public, Mr. Ryan, who was leading Obama in the polls by like, 40 points, was forced to drop out of the race.
The republicans substituted that freak Alan Keyes, and Obama beat him easily.
So, were it not for the extreme hotness of Jeri Ryan, and her ex-husband forcing her into swinging, Obama would have never been a Senator, and not in a position to be President today.
Democrats should be sending Jeri Ryan flowers or somethin....