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."
If at first you don't succeed.... (Score:5, Funny)
...adapt to their defenses and continue assimilation.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:If at first you don't succeed.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Somehow, I don't think Jeri Ryan works for Microsoft
So you've identified the problem.... now what's the solution?
Re:If at first you don't succeed.... (Score:5, Funny)
Come to think of it, I don't think the word "soft" applies anywhere near Ryan. :D
You obviously missed the two most important points here!
Re:If at first you don't succeed.... (Score:4, Funny)
Come to think of it, I don't think the word "soft" applies anywhere near Ryan. :D
You obviously missed the two most important points here!
Come to think of it, the word "micro" doesn't apply anywhere near Ryan!
Re:If at first you don't succeed.... (Score:4, Funny)
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There fixed it for ya. :P
Gah! (Score:3, Funny)
Having big boobs and a catsuit [wikipedia.org] helps too ;)
The mental image of Ballmer wearing that suit just gives me the creeps.
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.
Re:If at first you don't succeed.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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: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: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.
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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.
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No, not really. Customer has to be blamed too.
Customer that takes up shit rationalizes decision to feed shit by boards. In a dream world where customer would demand at least some kind of quality versus quick gratification it would be rational for shareholders to push for quality.
It's all about picking the rational decision that will maximize revenue. Revenue is generated by customers (generally).
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Yahoo Mail -> Live conversion? No thanks.
Why? You might actually start getting all your mail then.
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Why down on Silverlight? Am I the only person who hopes that Adobe has some real competition for once?
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You must be new here. Anything MS is bad!
Anyways, I agree with you. Adobe needs some real competition. In my mind they are worse than MS in many ways.
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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 nee
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Google is the (traditional) Microsoft of the web
It's not. The lock-in effect is missing, plain and simple.
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Microsoft shareholders, on the other hand, should be screaming bloody murder.
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So, the logical conclusion is that we need to input a sleep command into the Microsoft collective. Surely then, after a couple of hours, their Redmond HQ and other cubes will spontaneously explode.
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Don't forget the "petty revenge" factor. Instead of WinCE, it'll probably run "Windows Me."
Poor Jerry.
Ah, so this is it... (Score:2)
Ah, so _this_ is MS after Gates?!? [slashdot.org]
Re:Ah, so this is it... (Score:4, Funny)
Yahoo needs a restraining order (Score:5, Funny)
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As a yahoo user, I feel strangely threatened. I can't explain it, but it"s like a bad ex-girlfriend who just can't accept no for an answer.
You're on Slashdot. Don't even pretend you know what the world girlfriend means. And especially don't pretend you know what it means to actually break up one!
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Isn't "break up a girlfriend" sort of what Reiser did?
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Not only is this not a car analogy, but...ex-girlfriend?
Think Christine [wikipedia.org] :)
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.
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: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.
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.
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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 tha
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Perhaps the concern is not about total market share, but limited growth. Going from 50-90% market share = growth = happy stock holders. At 90+ market share, you need to grow revenue by increasing price/unit or by expanding to new product areas (e.g. buy games companies, sharepoint, etc.). Companies are valued based on expectations of future revenue growth. If you already own the O/S, office suite markets and have respectable shares of the messaging and gaming markets, where else do you find revenue grow
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.
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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.
Just like Google buying YouTube made sense because there was no Google Video, and Yahoo buying Jumpcut only made sense because there was no Yahoo Video.
Or, this could be exactly business as usual in the industry.
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I thought Google paid way too much for YouTube, but at least they bought the company with the most market share. Microsoft wants to spend a ton on a company in decline. What are they going to do with it?
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Well, to be fair, Yahoo in general may not be awesome, but there are some products of theirs that are pretty good. I prefer Yahoo's news setup to Google's or Microsoft's. Flickr is pretty good. Yahoo video is probably technically superior to YouTube at this point, if still much lacking in market share. Yahoo Answers is without equal.
I don't get the idea of wanting to buy Yahoo's search, though. Live Search's problem isn't that it's technically inferior to Google at this point (though it may be) -- its
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yes, next question...
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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 read
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Which is why a big portion of the offer isn't cash, its MSFT funny money.
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If I had $10 every time someone proclaimed something to be the "doom of Microsoft" I'd have more money than Bill Gates. Give the hyperbole a rest; at worst this will be a slightly bad business decision. Fox buying MySpace wasn't the doom of either. Neither was Time-Warner buying AOL.
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 lik
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That's the modus operandi of Carl Icahn see TWA circa 1985. Btw calling him an activist investor is like calling Genghis Khan an activist equestrian.
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just to see Microsofts faces when every single user jumps ship to Google instead
There are those who are using AT&T DSL, which is hosted through Yahoo!. Harder for those guys to jump ship.
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]
Typical Business Practice (Score:2)
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This stuff shouldn't be a surprise, in other industries this type of thing goes on all the time.
In other industries, there's usually a sound business reason for a takeover. A Microsoft/Yahoo takeover would be a disaster for both companies.
PowerSet (Score:5, Funny)
To be a fly on the wall in these meetings:
Ballmer: Let's buy Yahoo.
Board Member: They won't sell.
Ballmer: Did you ask them, or tell them?
Board Member: A little of both.
Ballmer: Did you say we'll be their best friend?
Board Member: Yeah, but Yang just watched Pirates of Silicon Valley and isn't fooled.
Ballmer: Is that the movie with Johnny Depp, or the good one with Jenna Jameson?
Board Member:...
Ballmer: What's this "PowerSet" thing?
Board Member: That's a start-up Websearch company. They're doing a lot of what we want to do with Live search.
Ballmer: Great! Buy it!
Board Member: Okay, so I guess that takes care of the Yahoo--
Ballmer: Buy them, too!
Board Member: What? Why? Powerset will--
Ballmer: They're working with Google! It's anti-competitive! We have to buy them! And it will make Live search even stronger after we incorperate SourPet--
Board Member: PowerSet--
Ballmer: Whatever! Just buy Yahoo so we can say we're not anti-competitive.
Board Member: You want to purchase two separate Internet search systems, incorperate them into our failed system, to avoid anti-competitive practices?
Ballmer: Finally! It's like talking to a brick wall sometimes, y'know?
give me the ball puppy (Score:4, Funny)
Fortune's take: Not Compting w/ Google on Tech (Score:5, Interesting)
Google not a technology innovator says Slashdoter (Score:2)
Insert free advert for Live Search
"This strikes me as very similar to some of the criticisms I hear on Microsoft: they don't innovate in technology - they innovate in business model"
This is new to me, that Ms 'innovate in business model', if by innovate you mean lean on the the OEMs to keep other companies technology off their Desktop, then I can acquiesce to that. Do you have any other examples of Microso
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I largely disagree with the suggestion that Google hasn't been a technology innovator. As you point out, their search engine won out because it was massively better search technology than the competition. Then you've got Gmail and Google Maps which took Ajax and web-based-apps to a new level, crushing the competition with better technology. Google also has major innovations in using MapReduce and commodity hardware infrastructure that allows them to scale their technologies extremely cheaply and reliably
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.
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I agree with you. Too many people think that unless you invented the bit and built up from there then you didn't innovate. Every innovation builds on previous innovations. Even if a new innovation is simple a user interface or a slick use of AJAX. Google has a knack right now for taking things that are cool and making them work in a very non-intrusive manner. This is in of itself an innovation. They didn't need to invent email to be credited with inventing a very slick email web interface and API.
Oh a
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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. W
In not-quite-related news (Score:2)
I usually use babelfish to make words translations, but I was shocked to be redirected from babelfish.altavista.com to babelfish.yahoo.com the other day.
Has Yahoo! bought AltaVista? Wouldn't their new combined marketshare make them an even bigger threat for Microsoft?
What if Yahoo! is in the process of buying all the once-major players? (WebCrawler, AltaVista, etc)
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What if Yahoo! is in the process of buying all the once-major players? (WebCrawler, AltaVista, etc)
Whoa, then maybe Yahoo! could buy itself.
Yahoo bought Altavista and AllTheWeb years ago (Score:3, Informative)
Yahoo bought Altavista and AllTheWeb years ago.
All those former well known web search services are just brands for Yahoo search.
btw. Bablefish is just a brand name around the underlying third party software "Systran".
Ichan doersnt give a shit about computers (Score:2)
Interesting questions .. (Score:2)
Exactly when did Icahn start buying yahoo shares?
Who complained to the justice department over the yahoo/google deal?
Who approached in relation to the MS/Yahoo takeover bid?
What exactly is the quid pro quo in Icahn helping out Microsoft on the acquisition?
"I do believe the following -- that this company, yahoo!, is a very strategic and important acquisition for microsoft"
"The only way, you know, that m
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Who complained to the justice department over the yahoo/google deal?
Apparently, someone who didn't consider the fact that if it worked against a Yahoo/Google merger, it would likely work against a Yahoo/Microsoft merger as well...
On the other hand, I suppose they may have realized that it wouldn't actually work, but the thought that it might would add useful pressure on Yahoo...
Even if it wouldn't have worked against a Yahoo/Google merger, I suppose there's still hope that it might work against a Yahoo/Mi
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.
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so why do you think Microsoft/Balmer is so hell bent on shutting them down?
And if yahoo is so bad, how bad can Microsoft's MSN be since they are still in a distant 3rd place?
So either Microsoft is a technological failure and can't code a search engine to find an index.html page if it was on their own site, or it is that AND they need to eliminate 2nd place before the 2nd place advertisers move to Google instead of Microsoft. Just like how they grew MS Exchange by purchasing Hotmail and claiming them in mark
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Actually, Yahoo did innovate still: they introduced Yahoo Groups - preceeding Google. Then there's Yahoo Finance, which is one of the most comprehensive and popular resources on corporate investments. More Yahoo services inroduced after Mail:
Yahoo Answers.
Flicker
Babelfish - ok, not their innovation at all, and not really all that of an innovation anyway, but it's still the best translator on the WWW.
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IIRC, most of the eyeballs came from eGroups, which they bought and merged into Yahoo Groups. (and eGroups itself was a merger of eGroups and OneList.)
When Yahoo! took over, the groups gradually became less useful; the worst was interstitial ads, which would show up every once in a while when you clicked on a message. Given that the search function could only search N messages at a time, this made groups fairly useless. You'd try to search f
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Flickr and Yahoogroups were companies purchased by Yahoo! !innovation.
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You mean like Yahoo Zimbra [zimbra.com], Yahoo Shine [yahoo.com], or even Yahoo Widgets [yahoo.com]?
Or even Yahoo OpenID [yahoo.com]
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It will never stop (Score:2)
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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.
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. =/
Not about search, but e-mail (Score:2)
This is all about getting control of the AT&T DSL e-mail accounts that Yahoo provides.
Won't somebody (Score:2)
think of the users? There may be some money in this short term, but in the end it's going to hurt the internet community as a whole.
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It would be a huge acquisition and could help build a lot of momentum if they can also get some good new stuff out.
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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.
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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.
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They've pretty much already done that on their own. I used to use yahoo for services, google for search. Yahoo maps *used* to be the best mapping app out there, but then google outdid them. At that point in time, I still used Yahoo for movies and tv listings. They screwed those up horribly [ajaxian.com], and Google did better with their movie listings.
Yahoo was on top. They became complacent. Then in an effort to 'catch up' they alien
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You seriously underestimate Carl Icahn. Granted he was dumb enough to buy into Blockbuster, so what do I know.
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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
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Microsoft doesn't actually have to _buy_ Yahoo!. They previously made an offer, Yahoo's stocks soared. They "negotiated," and retracted that offer and Yahoo's stocks plummeted further than they had been at to begin with.
Wrong. Just last week Yahoo's stock stabilized to their pre-MS-offer levels.
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I mean, yahoo just plain sucks. People call it an open source company yet it has yet to release an update to its messenger client for linux. their search feature is as good as webcrawler back in 1995 (which wasn't good). their mail service is worse than aol's free mail service. their music service is dead. Besides, for many people who have made it a habit to goto google the minute they open their web browser, its easier/habitual to type blackle.com/google.com than typing yahoo.com.
Uh-- Yahoo's mail servi