Yahoo Ends Talks With Microsoft, Embraces Google Instead 214
snydeq writes with a story from InfoWorld which says that "Yahoo has ended its talks with Microsoft and is instead nearing an agreement with Google. Yahoo's purported reason for breaking off the talks? That Microsoft was only interested in purchasing Yahoo's search business, not all of the company. 'Such a transaction would not be consistent with the company's view of the converging search and display marketplaces, would leave the company without an independent search business that it views as critical to its strategic future and would not be in the best interests of Yahoo stockholders,' the company said in a statement. The deal with Google allegedly involves Yahoo's search advertising business. The move likely will draw more ire from Icahn and may in fact remain part of the elaborate poker game between the two companies. Microsoft said this alternative transaction remains on the table and did not confirm that talks between it and Yahoo have concluded." Update: 06/12 23:58 GMT by T : CWmike writes "Just hours after saying it ended talks with Microsoft, Yahoo announced that it will start running advertising from Google alongside Yahoo search results. Yahoo expects the deal, which has a 10-year term, to generate $250 million to $450 million in operating cash flow during the first 12 months."
LULZ (Score:5, Funny)
Re:LULZ (Score:4, Funny)
I sense a disturbance in the force... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I sense a disturbance in the force... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:LULZ (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not a MS supporter (or troll), that was an honest question...
Re:LULZ (Score:5, Funny)
Re:LULZ (Score:5, Funny)
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Interesting. That's the sound I make when I wake up in the morning. I'd hate to pay a fee every day if that word gets trademarked.
Re:LULZ (Score:5, Funny)
Re:LULZ (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:LULZ (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is why they were, you know, found guilty?
Re:LULZ (Score:5, Insightful)
porl
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Look on the bright side (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:LULZ (Score:5, Insightful)
That's about the only Yahoo! service that I still consider superior to Google's offerings.
Superficial reasoning aside, yes and no.
On one hand, a Goo-ho! would involve diluting the corporate culture of Google, risking it becoming less of a company that I look up to as an example of how to be successful and ethical. That would be bad. On the other hand, these two companies could actually mesh well when you consider WHAT they provide. The resulting conglomeration would have about the best of most of the 'big' web services that are offered out there.
A Yah-soft would just be the next interation of Microsoft Live! before it tanked yet again due to poor manaegment and a lack of any discernable goals other than "we need to be out there, doing... something!"
Re:LULZ (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you missed the main issue that deals with web marketing--a topic that most geeks on slashdot are not familiar with. The problem with Yahoo siding with Google is that it helps establish Google as the king of search and online advertising. All three services (Google, Yahoo, MSN) make a huge chunk if their revenue through online advertising and marketing services. Since Google will now have it's hands toying around with Yahoo, Google could just slowly eat away at Yahoo's margins or eventually buy them out. That would leave the last significant competitor as MSN which isn't even much of a competitor. The end result is basically a Google monopoly on web marketing until the next big disruptive marketing tech comes along.
Google's online marketing market share is already so significant that most web marketing firms won't even touch Yahoo or MSN networks because the effort is simply not worth the return. But now you say if I go through Google I'll also get a piece of Yahoo? Big win for Google.
In this situation, I think Yahoo honestly had a choice between two devils with different faces. They may have royally pissed off their shareholders with shrugging off MS, but they may keep their company alive for a little longer.
As far as my own opinion, I'm split. On one side as a consumer, I think there needs to be more web marketing competitors to compete with Google in order to maintain a healthy market. On the other hand I am a Google shareholder. I suppose in this case I win (and lose) either way.
depends on who you are... (Score:2)
If you are a Yahoo stockholder, it M$ would give you an one time cash, but then Yahoo would be left to rot. With Google, they might have a good business, and eventually merge wholly with Google.
If you are a M$ stockholder, you should probably buy Yahoogle stock, it is safer (better for you), believe me.
If you are Icahn, you suck.
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And plenty of other reasons...
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Microsoft has several monopolies and regularly abuses them. Yahoo being acquired by them would give them enough share to be close to having several more, which would certainly become new monopolies soon as they abuse their other monopolies to make sure that happens.
On the other hand, even if Google and Yahoo merged, that would not necessarily give them even one monopoly. See how it makes a difference?
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Yes, it would be much, much better.
What we dislike about Microsoft is not that it is big and powerful but that it releases poor quality products and destroys its competition using monopolistic tactics.
Google, on the other hand, supports Free and open-source software, has excellent products that geeks love, is concerned about seamless co-operation and integration of all web services (even ones that they don't own) and wins by having the better product, and constantly improving it.
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In this case, Yahoo! made a NON-EXCLUSIVE deal with Google. This isn't monopolistic. Google also has a number of different deals with AOL. Google and Yahoo once had various deals with each other. Google also has a deal with Mozilla. Businesses do deals all the time, but ye
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Especially if if somehow would kill Microsoft monopoly.
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Re:LULZ (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:LULZ (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:LULZ (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft tried as they always do to manipulate the market place and get themselves a sweatheart deal rather then playing a more "fair game" as fair as large cap market stock deals get anyway. They ended up souring the deal. I think it was bad business on their part. They should have made a fair offer and done the deal. Sure Yahoo got hurt more then Microsoft did but thats not what it was about. Microsoft really lost an oppertunity they wanted, no matter how the outsiders and small investors see it, the Microhoo fiasco was a failure of Microsoft's.
I don't know what Google gets outa Yahoo other then sheer mass. I don't think Yahoo represents the top drawer tech when compared with Google. Yes there is some good Yahoo technology that Google can assimilate easily, but its probably not worth what Google has to pay. The brand and portal offerings are of little value to Google becase theirs are already better. To Google's credit though they have gotten quite big and demonstrated from a leadership standpoint they can manage the mass. If you are going to tangle with an 800lb gorrilla like Microsoft, being a 600lb gorilla rather then the 500lb you already are might give you that little bit of extra inertia needed to prevent Microsoft from steam rolling you by tring to take the web proprietary again with dotNet, still more activeX, and silverlight.
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YaHOOOOOOOOOgle...
Carl Icahn (Score:2)
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Also, in what way has Paul Allen failed? Seems to me he's doing rather well for himself.
The smartest thing he ever did was get out of the running of Microsoft. I was always of the opinion he was an ok bloke.
Re:Carl Icahn (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Carl Icahn (Score:5, Funny)
His various dot-com and VC projects have mostly cost him money (IIRC), his sports teams have mostly sucked, his 413 foot yacht has fallen to number 8 on the World's Largest Yacht list [wikipedia.org] and Jimi Hendrix was, in hindsight, wildly overrated. Without the billions in his pocket to begin with, you wouldn't say he's doing that well.
On the plus side, he's nowhere near as appalling as the seven guys with bigger yachts than his.
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cough I think you mean the Experience museum in Seattle, not Jimi himself ;-)
Hendrix had potential to be more (Score:4, Insightful)
I have several years of traditional music education under my belt and I'm a simply lousy (and then some) musician. No natural rhythm, and I could never improv. at all. I'm also slightly tone deaf to certain ranges of the register. However, programming is my natural talent. I 'learned' more about it from messing around and gut instinct than I really do in class. Then there's system/network administration; I can learn it and do it with a bit of effort, but I'm neither simply lousy or gifted at it.
I think this is how most people are. You either are gifted and only get much better with time, manage to be sufficient, or are lousy regardless of effort. It seems that musicians who are naturally gifted are relatively rare and (if they don't get in to jazz, where talent goes on to play and never get recognition) stand out amongst the rest quickly.
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If I had a yacht that big, I'd give it some really hot chick name, something really sexy. Pandora, Alastrina, Ailis, Iona, Andromeda would be good. Not Octopus! Fer chissakes, they're slimy and cold and have a sharp beak!
Then again, my boat is 14' long and 40 years old.... So what do I know.
Re:Carl Icahn (Score:5, Informative)
Also, in what way has Paul Allen failed? Seems to me he's doing rather well for himself.
Overall, sure, but he has certainly had his share of losers [businessweek.com]. For example, "BusinessWeek magazine calculated he had lost $US12 billion in the previous five years." [cyberiapc.com].
It almost brings a tear to my eye... (Score:3, Funny)
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Oh, you mean he *spent* it.
So... (Score:2)
Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
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Don't forget the !
I bet if there is one thing Yahoo would change in the combine name, they would make it Googlllle!
Go Get It, Lycos! (Score:2)
Sounds like a drink. "Enjoy the chocolatey goodness of Goohoo!"
No, 'Hoogle' (Score:2)
Not surprising... (Score:5, Insightful)
And of course, it's highly plausible that this whole effort from Microsoft was intended solely to serve their own interests by creating the perception they were going to acquire, and they never intended to go through with it, for whatever arcane market reasons.
Programming is simple. Business is complicated.
Re:Not surprising... (Score:5, Interesting)
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And of course, it's highly plausible that this whole effort from Microsoft was intended solely to serve their own interests by creating the perception they were going to acquire, and they never intended to go through with it, for whatever arcane market reasons.
On a deal this huge there's so much back-room strategy and PR feinting / posturing it's impossible for us normal geeks to get the real story. It's akin to planning the D-Day invasion while saying, 'yeah, we're thinking about sending a boat or two over there eventually.'
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My guess: No one. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm guessing that no one will win. Apparently no one has done even a little bit of creative thinking.
Re:Not surprising... (Score:5, Funny)
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Yahoo indexes a 404 as a valid search result.
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As far as I can see, msnbot has no restrictions, while Googlebot has several.
I wouldn't know how exactly Google indexes comments, but looking at robots.txt, it seems msnbot has all the advantages.
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No, I was echoing commentary I've read in the past that Microsoft never really intended to acquire Yahoo. I don't pretend to understand the details, but your comment is very ignorant.
Does this mean resistance is not futile? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Does this mean resistance is not futile? (Score:5, Funny)
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What Yahoo Wants? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What Yahoo Wants? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Does not DESERVE to take Yahoo!! They'd just ass-immolate it and run it into the ground, like so much else they've rubbished. Any other mouthpieces trying to slay Yahoo!'s board for not selling out to mshaft needs to STFU, however big their name. Just STFU and back off. Leave Yahoo! ALONE. Besides, mshaft has too damned big a war chest and they need to be reigned in. PERIOD. Moreover it seems that as Virtualization might have to still cope with OS-agnosticism, then maybe it's better that Google has Yahoo! than to watch mshaft take hold of Yahoo!, plain and simple.
A bit bitter (and bipolar) are we?
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Free market?
Splendid! I'll have two!
Let me be the first to cry (Score:4, Insightful)
Not So Fast... (Score:2)
If they don't do something to appease angry shareholders like do a stock buyback, they might wind up as Microhoo anyway.
Yahoo Ends Talks With Microsoft (Score:3, Funny)
Next thing you know, Yahoo will be extending Google. And then, good Lord!
Together they will be unstoppable (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's an idea (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Here's an idea (Score:5, Insightful)
QDOS -> MSDOS
MAC OS -> Windows
Spyglass -> IE
BSD TCPIP stack -> Spider stack -> Windows NT stack
JAVA -> J+ -> J#
Flash -> Silverlight
You must be REALLY new here!
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CP/M -> QDOS (developed by MS) -> MSDOS (QDOS in a nice shrink wrapped package)
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Your kidding right? I still regularly work on dedicated systems which still rely on MSDOS.
Spyglass -> IE - there's no Spyglass code remaining
It doesn't matter if any code remains. The original IE was just a rebranded Spyglass.
BSD TCPIP stack -> Spider stack -> Windows NT stack - from XP onwards, MSFT uses their own TCP/IP stack.
They always "said" they were using their own stack but we know that wasn't true.
JAVA -> J+ -> J# - There are superficial syntax sim
Oh, god, no... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Just the thought of that makes my lunch want to escape forcefully!
Re:Oh, god, no... (Score:4, Insightful)
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All of the search bits though... Ugh. I hated Yahoo when it was the only big player in the search/portal market, I tried to avoid using it like the plague sticking to the crappy DMOZ, Hotbot, and Webcrawler alternatives. Though getting listed on Yahoo in the mid-90's was shades of awesome.
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If these were any other two companies... (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, imagine if Apple were trying to acquire, for instance Transmeta, (purely hypothetical) and offering a 45%+ premium. And Transmeta in response turned it down and set up internal policies to make generous severence payments to employees who chose to leave after the acquisition.
What do you call that? I call it gross breach of fiduciary duty to your stockholders. I am fortunately not a Yahoo stockholder, but if I was, I'd be pretty pissed about this.
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What is this "gross breach of fiduciary duty" you speak of? Is that a legal thing?
Yang boarding a flight to the Caribbean with suitcases stuffed with cash would be one thing, thinking beyond a one time buyout deal is quite another.
From almost exactly a year ago: http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/9388783?f=related [cfo.com]
Suing a corporation for not selling their grandmothers for a nickel is an abuse of the legal system.
Re:If these were any other two companies... (Score:5, Insightful)
They take no pride in the company in which they have stock.
They don't care about employees or customers.
They have huge great dollar signs in their eyes and cannot see past them.
They would gladly fuck it to death for all the money they can and then dispose of the corpse.
That, my friend, is 'fiduciary duty'. Fuck 'em to death, wring the cash out then wash your hands and move to the next target to suck the life out of.
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No matter how much money I invest in a company, it won't automatically make me wiser about the industry, or more familiar with the internal culture. My opinion doesn't somehow become valid, and weighted by how much money I've put on
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If these were any other two companies ... would we be seeing the same reaction on Slashdot?
Well, if they were companies as heavily invested in the computing industry and with as much influence, and one of them was an abuse monopoly single-handedly responsible for holding back progress in multiple areas of the computer industry for decades, well then probably.
Seriously, imagine if Apple were trying to acquire, for instance Transmeta...
Not many people would care because Apple doesn't have a monopoly, hasn't been abusing it, and will likely not result in any market stagnating and resulting detrimental effects for those of us here.
Re:imagine this ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Suppoesed poker game (Score:2, Interesting)
The "elaborate poker game" is pure speculation (no pun intended). It is entirely possible that Yahoo mgmt and executives actually think ownership by Microsoft is bad for the future of the company.
This "Yahoo is bluffing" meme assumes that it is illogical for Yahoo to think that they are better off without Microsoft. Why is it so hard to accept? From where I'm sitting, a Microsoft deal would be bad for Yahoo.
I would agree with you if you were right (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/21/business/suit.php
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/01/15/business/fraud.php
As I stated somewhere else on this story, embezzlement and fraud are the kind of things that would give shareholders the right to damages.
And think about it. Where did you develop this opinion? This is the very definition of a meme.
"What is best for shareholders" is subjective. I'd say the very survival of the company is in shareholders' long-term interest.
Evil is as Evil does... (Score:4, Interesting)
It is like taking the the industry's two biggest's evils and putting them in one company model.
Take Apple's (less than truthful and borderline brainwashing) marketing team, and combine this with a company out growing its footprint with so many internal groups and people working with 'competitive' emerging technologies (like Microsoft of the early 90s) and you will get one of the biggest and evil company models in history.
Google digging through GMail years ago should of been the first 'heads-up', but their recent 'embrace, extend, use for the gain, not the consumers' mentaility has taken over tons of OSS projects that originally had no 'questionable' back doors, like Firefox does now with its search monitoring and Google ties that it easily hands the data to at any request.
As for Yahoo, they took a phone book model, moved to a real search engine (finally) and then was able to survive with gaming and IM (online gaming communities being the key for them). Yahoo has market share, not technology that anyone wants. Yahoo doesn't have internal development that is more advanced than Google or Microsoft when it comes to community, development, or search technologies. It would be more of a win for Google, as Google would get a solid IM technology, where MS doesn't need IM or any of the other services.
So I think it is good that Google will eat up Yahoo, so it will go away, but the warning on the label, it is giving more power to ONE company, and sadly this company (Google) is no longer by nature alone a 'do no evil' company, any more than Microsoft of the 90s was.
People act like Microsoft tried to use Windows around 1995 to kill off other companies, but people forget during this whole timeframe and Internet movement, Microsoft was heavily investing in MSN and online technologies, but the Win95 and Win98 OS CDs installed icons and installatino software for everything from AOL to Compuserve, as well as Java and other crap that Microsoft did not produce, most of which being competitive software outside the Windows division.
Google needs a big reign in, or a self check, if not as they doing now, will be bigger and far more evil than Microsoft... And be manipulating the online media with their ad control, like they have already done with their anti-MS shoves to tech journalists.
And in the fragile online world, all it sometimes takes is a mild threat or offering a free venue and some hardware...
Chris P. and his free Macs, just all of sudden deciding he hates Vista because HP wouldn't update their driver for his ancient scanner/printer, and this leading him to love Macs based on usage and 'technical' reasons. And the printer/scanner didn't work any better under OS X, but he failed to admit this part of 'his' story.
However having some contact with him, he admitted he really didn't understand the technology and his defense was that he was not a journalist or a tech person and was just in the entertainment business.
Yet he did 'technical' videos and blogs about OS X and Vista during this time that was information he 'obtained' from both Apple and anti-MS companies of interest, and was using their material because it was easier for him. And yet he made news off all this, and mislead a lot of people in the process for a couple of free computers and guaranteed venues for his 'show'.
Anyone that doens't keep one eye open on Google will find history repeating itself. Even the firefox ties should be enough to scare the crap out of users. Add in Yahoo IM, and their moving 'mobile' presence with a bit of 'borderline' Apple type marketing, and everyone will be racing to screw themselves when Google says, boo, let alone the amount of IT information they already control in the onlin
This is scary (Score:2)
Re:Slashnot? (Score:4, Informative)
By the way, for an actual good Slashdot side-site, http://www.seenonslash.com/ [seenonslash.com]
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