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Microsoft Businesses The Internet

Microsoft And Time Warner Resume Talks 58

Posted by Zonk from the divvying-up-the-internet dept.
An anonymous reader writes: "Seems as though Microsoft and Time Warner have come back together at the negotiating table." From the article: "The two companies are focused on combining AOL's Web content with Microsoft's search-engine technology, although other aspects of the talks are sketchy. It isn't clear whether they are considering merging their Internet dial-up businesses, which generate lots of cash, the paper said. The two companies originally began discussions about some sort of Internet deal earlier this year. But the talks stalled in the late summer over a range of issues including technical obstacles and questions about control."
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Microsoft And Time Warner Resume Talks More

Microsoft And Time Warner Resume Talks

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  • ftc (Score:1, Funny)

    by TedCheshireAcad ( 311748 )
    Where is the Federal Trade Commission when you need them? Seriously, as much as I don't like government messing in the affairs of business, it's times like this where it could be justified.

    Well, if they do merge, I just hope the new company is called HyperCompuGlobalMegaNet.

    • Re:ftc (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Cylix ( 55374 )
      It's not precisely competitition when they both make heavy use of managed ports.

      In most places whether its, AOL, Earthlink or MSN... you are connecting to a third party POP like UU.net.

      Funny how that works...

  • What? (Score:5, Funny)

    by E IS mC(Square) ( 721736 ) on Saturday October 08, 2005 @07:24AM (#13745986) Journal
    >>The two companies are focused on combining AOL's Web content with Microsoft's search-engine technology

    Okay, there are two unknowns here. Can somebody tell me what is AOL's web content, and which is Microsoft's search engine technology?

  • Great news! (Score:5, Funny)

    by jettoki ( 894493 ) on Saturday October 08, 2005 @07:28AM (#13745994)
    The two companies are focused on combining AOL's Web content with Microsoft's search-engine technology... Anything that makes it harder to find "AOL's Web content" is fine by me.
  • I know, I know, trolling and all that -- feel free to mod me into oblivion. But I can't really think of any two companies who are more evil than those two (although a few come to mind which are equally so). If MS and AOL combine, could it even get any more evil than that? Unless..! [bbspot.com]
    • hahaa... don't worry man, you only get modded for trolling if you are pro MS... since that was anti- you are safe. I'll get modded for saying this though........
    • Uh, step out of your basement, kiddo.

      The companies poisoning our earth, funding civil wars in Africa over stupid clear rocks, or even pilfering the pockets of employees and shareholders are far more evil.

      I know this is slashdot and all, but you could try and tone done the rhetoric to "semicoherent."
      • Shoot a man in the head and you have killed him. Take away his ability to transmit knowledge to his progeny, take away his ability to communicate freely and you have killed mankind, you have killed what it means to be human.

        What MS is evil of another magnitude. Any old corporation can lobby the govt to drop bombs on brown people (it's easy!), MS is going after our ability to persist information, to pass what we know to our children and grandchildren.
    • If MS and AOL combine, could it even get any more evil than that?

      [rising to the tollbait] yeah, they'll be running it all on SCO, powered by bio-diesel created from dead genetically-modified baby seals which were clubbed to death by Larry Ellison.

  • Great for Yahoo, bad for Google (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CDPatten ( 907182 ) on Saturday October 08, 2005 @07:33AM (#13746005) Homepage
    AOL provides 40% of google's click revenue, if they start using MS then Yahoo becomes number 1, MS becomes a player, and google loses almost half of its revenue stream all in one clean swoop.

  • Is This a Big Deal? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fragmentate ( 908035 ) * <jdspilled.gmail@com> on Saturday October 08, 2005 @07:36AM (#13746012) Journal
    Neither of them are terribly huge in the search market. Google is the clear winner there. So, let's say they do merge, they jump from 12% market share to... 12% market share?

    The paranoid might see this as some sort of threat, I suppose. Perhaps you should look to Google if you want to fuel the flames of your paranoia. They have a pretty aggressive strategy for, well, just about everything. Multimedia, search, searching multimedia, desktop search, hell, I heard they're even coming out with BrainSearch so you can remember who that was you slept with last night.

    As for the dialup market... it's dying off. And with so many locales having serious talks of wireless-for-everyone -- why, one taste of the difference between wireless and dialup will sell just about anyone.

    Anyone that thinks this is a big deal as far as some monster being created is probably either distributing FUD, or open to buying it.
    • I heard they're even coming out with BrainSearch so you can remember who that was you slept with last night.

      dev/null?

    • OK, call me paranoid if you want, and this will either be modded troll or never noticed, but here goes.

      The one thing Tim Warner has the would really benefit Microsoft is its cable franchises. This would be a big lever to impose Microsoft tech in the entertainment field - Windows Media formats and MS DRM.

      If Microsoft took over your cable modem services, that would be the real nightmare scenario. One way or another, subtle or overt, they would require using Windows as a condition of internet access. And t

  • Marriage of Content & Tech (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dekortage ( 697532 ) on Saturday October 08, 2005 @07:54AM (#13746050) Homepage
    Let's face it, Time Warner's strengths are in content (magazines, movies, books) while Microsoft's strengths are in technology (to put it politely). The one thing Google does not have is exclusive content. Imagine if MSN and AOL began delivering exclusive Time Warner branded content -- could be enough to attract a lot of people.

    Just a thought.

    • Re:Marriage of Content & Tech (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sporkboy ( 22212 ) on Saturday October 08, 2005 @09:31AM (#13746301) Homepage
      Bah. This is exactly what people were saying a few years back during the original AOL-TimeWarner merger. A content behemoth with a high-tech darling to deliver that content. How could they be stopped? Unfortunately for them, it didn't work out that way and all it did was cost a lot of TW shareholders a fortune.
  • So they started talking again. woo. *balloons* *confetti* bleh.

    My prediction. If anything comes out of this, it will be Microsoft supporting both formats.
  • ...there will be only one company. MergeCo.

    It sell everything from software to pornography to heating oil, and will immediately either purchase or simply firebomb any competitor out of existence.

    People will call this system a "free market".

    And all will be well with the world.

  • Why the focus on Dial-Up (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Pudusplat ( 574705 ) on Saturday October 08, 2005 @08:10AM (#13746089)
    One would assume that companies with as much know how (They must know something) as these two would realize that revenue from dial-up is going to continue to shrink and eventually die. There's no long term benefit to focusing on a dial-up service.

    It just boggles my mind that a service that has been made obsolete (except in rural areas, but that will happen eventually too) is still focused on by such large companies. You'd think at least AOL would have learned from their mistakes and switched their focus entirely by now.

  • Makes me think of the movie "other peoples money" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by voss ( 52565 ) on Saturday October 08, 2005 @08:16AM (#13746110)
    What would Lawrence "Larry the liquidator" Garfield say about this.

    "I bet 10 years ago there were dozens of dial-up companies...5 years from now there will only be one
    and I bet you it will be the best damn dial up company you ever saw...but would you want to be a shareholder in that company?"

    This is not an aquisition to create a new internet behemoth, this is cannibalism. This is microsoft eating AOL getting its list of technophobes and little old grannies. Its Time Warner dumping AOL for as much money as it can get. The only worrysome part is Microsoft getting control of Netscape. I suspect we can get the feds to force Microsoft to sell off Netscapes trademarks and assets as a condition of sale and that SHOULD be Mozillas stand on the issue.

  • This won't happen - some thoughts (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rhyd ( 614491 ) on Saturday October 08, 2005 @08:17AM (#13746114)
    M$ might be wanting to get all that targeted ad revenue and search bums on seats but that isn't what Time Warner is offering. Time Warner (IMO) is looking to dump AOL with extreme predjudice, this means washing their hands forever, finito. The article talks about merging MSN&AOL and spinning them off as a merged company - but M$ can't do that because MSN is core to their strategy to 'KILL google'.

    Any company that just buys and absorbs AOL is going to take a stock hit. The market knows AOL is piece of shit, with dial-up customers abandoning it, no penetration in broadband (locked out in effect by telecoms and cable gatekeepers), the naive new-to-the-information-super-highway-please-rape-m e-mr-aol customer is dead - that market is over, grandmama has got herself a blog. I digressed there but my point was microsofts stock has been performing shit-to-flat since 2000 and is poised for a little rise this next 12 months with various new products. The only reason to absorb AOL would be if they were afraid of the big institutions dumping at the first hit of an upturn. M$FT recently has been a lame stock, propped up by buy-backs and crappy (throw me africkin bone) dvidends - the halcyon days are over see the mini-blog. Why would balmer exasberate this downward trend?

    Even M$N employees have said MSN is at best a bit of fun. A place where cash is burned on shiny projects just to stay relevent and keep a presense. Microsofts heart just isn't in the internet at all, that might change so they keep an oar in.

    Microsoft could take 30% of googles ad revenue and M$FT stock wouldn't budge. M$ is just too bloody big, it would be a penny in the ocean of cash. But googles stock would probably be in some trouble. M$ would just be hurting google for the sake of hurting something. Possible even typical (but would the share-holding sheep go along in 2005 when its their dividend being sqandered on balmers he-man [really you need to see the current mini-blog] ego-trip board games)

    MSN messenger and AIM already link up anyway.

    You can mix pig-shit and horse-shit anyway you want - but you'll never make a tasty treat.
    • Let me give you one reason Microsoft might see an advantage despite the many down sides you have listed, that is, one less site pushing Netscape/Firefox to its users.

      You might not think that would suffice as a reason for MS to blow excess funds, but there are signs that something about Firefox has some factions within Microsoft very fearful. Perhaps that fear is justified.

  • No way there's going to be a merger (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Pudusplat ( 574705 ) on Saturday October 08, 2005 @08:18AM (#13746119)
    Why all this talk of merger scares? A joint venture is one thing, but these companies will simply not merge. You think Billy has any intention of giving up ownership or control of Microsoft? Ted might have got into bed with Steve Case, but I think a Ménage à trois is pushing things a bit too far.

    Plus, who who would be on top? I don't think Bill would enjoy biting the pillow.

  • Both are ISPs, though ... that's what's crucial (Score:5, Insightful)

    by almound ( 552970 ) on Saturday October 08, 2005 @08:30AM (#13746154) Homepage
    Together they can filter the DNS addresses of a good share of Internet traffic, like both have done already. Here's slashdotters recognizing that TimeWarner did so against www.inforwars.com and against www.prisonplanet.tv:

    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=164421&thresho ld=-1&commentsort=1&tid=95&mode=thread&pid=1372760 [slashdot.org] 2#13727627

    Alright, supposing for the sake of argument that the Level 3 filtering is just a rivalry between two ISPs ... the point is, the end-result is at least the danger of DNS address filtering no matter how you slice it. Alternatives to mainstream reporting gets squashed by such moves.

    As to regulation, a legitimate purpose of government is to prevent such abuse by corporate entities (which have legal rights as "persons" under the law, yet have far greater freedom at the public's expense to acquire wealth than do either you or I). Of course, the fact that government has not done so in the past and has allowed the increase of such abuse means that government will probably not do so in this case.

    As usual, we cannot depend upon government to protect us even though it should. So, it becomes important to get the word out to so people to stop subsidizing such abuse by dropping both Microsoft's and Time Warner. For those left without alternatives, isn't that an argument in and of itself to prevent monopolization by these giants?
  • Seems kind of ironic that this is only about AOL, etc., especially when MS seems to be losing the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray war.
  • "technical obstacles and questions about control."

    Those are never problems for Microsoft...

  • chemistry 101 (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    IANAC but if you combine shit with shit, don't you get shit?

    Hungover Hank
  • Doesn't this article remind you of the book Jennifer Government?
  • This is no suprise. Microsoft needs to try to become a great force in search to keep up with Google and AOL is content and no power anymore. Anyone at search.msn.com would be salivating over this kind of a deal so that the search services could be enhanced.

    One great article by Microsofts Scoble http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/10/04.html#a 11372 [weblogs.com] shows that there is along way yet before search is over, the domination by Google is only for a short time if they only were to protect their lead but would be

  • Most Window users are more of alternate operating systems such as Linux than they are of alternatives to Norton's antivirus. So many computers come with Norton's that the vast majority have never used anything else and aren't aware of alternative AV programs, such as AVG, Avast, NOD32, etc. The only other antivirus software I've seen being sold at Wal-Mart (the biggest store chain in the US) is McAffee's.

    Seems to me that Symantec has more of a monopoly on AV applications than Microsoft does on operating s

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