Ballmer: We're Lucky Microsoft Didn't Buy Yahoo

alphadogg writes (quoting Networkworld): "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer feels intensely fortunate that his company's $44 billion bid for Yahoo back in 2008 never materialized. 'Sometimes you're lucky,' he said with a smile at Web 2.0 Summit, responding to a question from conference co-chair John Battelle. Careful not to offend his search market partner, Ballmer put his comment in context, saying that any CEO would feel grateful for not making a major acquisition in the months prior to the global financial collapse that started in the second half of 2008."

Re:A better investment for that $44B: Apple

[TechLA]

Microsoft already owns Apple stocks. It owns lots of Facebook stock too, and that has grown even more than Apple within the recent years and become one of the most visited sites on the internet.

Also lucky since Yahoo's decline has continued

[JoshuaZ]

He's also lucky in that it is even more apparent now in 2011 than it was in 2008 that Yahoo is flailing and not doing well at all. On the other hand, maybe if Microsoft had purchased it the new overarching management would have done a better job. Also, part of the failure of Yahoo has been Bing taking some of their former market share. And since Yahoo Search is essentially going to be Bing soon http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8174763.stm [bbc.co.uk] that's essentially done with. Yahoo has very little left that it is used that is that popular. When I was younger a lot of people used Yahoo! Games for things like chess, and I understand that that still has a fair bit of use. But that was actually an acquisition from outside http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Games [wikipedia.org] of another website. They've done very little to further develop or improve that since then. Overall, they simply haven't been very proactive with improving their existing services, and of those they have modified it has often been not for the better. In some sense part of the problem is that much of what they have is while not a full walled-garden, it is a garden that isn't easy to move in and out of. And that just doesn't work very well. (Although it does seem like some of the mobile devices are definitely moving back in that direction. Maybe if Yahoo made a more functioning version of their stuff in the form of apps?)

Re:Yahoo?

[Toonol]

Yahoo mail isn't any worse than any of the alternative email programs. I know lots of people that still use Yahoo for mail.

None of them use it as a start page/portal/search engine, though. I'm not sure of any functionality it has other than mail that is particularly valuable... it has some ok financial reporting, I think.

I miss having a good tiered and human-reviewed directory of web sites, though, like Yahoo was when it started.

Re:Yahoo?

[AmazinglySmooth]

I use Yahoo as an RSS reader. It works just fine for that. For search I use Google. It works just fine for that. For email I use Gmail. It works just fine for that. I use hotmail as a spam catcher. It works just fine for that. I use Facebook for wasting time. It works just fine for that. Why change when stuff works fine? What's better? Being cool and using the latest tools or being productive using what works for you?

Re:Yahoo?

[Kyusaku Natsume]

I use it for mail, it is very convenient since it is like a home address, my yahoo mail address has been the same since 1996, maybe earlier. By using it with the mail app in OS X and iOS devices it isn't slower than Google's or Microsoft's offers. Also, in Japan Yahoo auctions is still the most popular site, they beat eBay. Still, asking $44 billlion for that was a stretch. Maybe a third of that was in the realm of reasonable.

In the previous tread someone posted about the lousy management of Yahoo, an it is true since it was Yahoo who funded Google but they were stupid enough to not try to keep a substantial share of that company. Google could have been Yahoo's equivalent of the Bell Labs and their cash cow.