Microsoft Just Can't Quit Yahoo 124
itwbennett writes "Back in October, rumors surfaced (and then quickly subsided) that Microsoft was considering another bid to purchase Yahoo. Now the rumors are back, and this time Microsoft is said to be in talks with other prospective buyers about some kind of partnership to acquire the troubled Internet company."
I have $5 (Score:4, Funny)
Perhaps I can buy Yahoo. On second thought, that's probably too steep.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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BTW if anybody hasn't tried the Win 8 developer preview its out now for free and you really should give it a go. its got epic fail written on it so deep you're amazed it doesn't make your PC release a rancid shit smell when you run it.
Mod parent informative! And pray for all the poor bastards doomed to run Win8. On the one hand, I think they should release it as-is, and thus spur mac and linux adoption. On the other hand, I worry that it will open a portal to R'lyeh. Either way, leave it to Microsoft to design the only interface that could make Unity look good. For certain values of 'good'.
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BTW if anybody hasn't tried the Win 8 developer preview its out now for free and you really should give it a go. its got epic fail written on it so deep you're amazed it doesn't make your PC release a rancid shit smell when you run it.
So maybe 2012 will finally be the year of the Linux desktop, the year everyone stops using desktop OSs anyway.
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No, I'm not missing the big picture the idiots running Yahoo more or less ran themselves out of business. Unless they get a new and competent board I can't imagine things turning around.
You'd be surprised at how much inertia factors into these things. How many of those people created those accounts recently versus still have them from years back? I personally still have a lycosmail account which I've had since before they acquired mailcity.
Re:I have $5 (Score:4, Informative)
It is not ment to be used for any other purpose than for developers to start playing with the new APIs using HTML5 and JavaScript
The new APIs are not restricted to HTML5 and JS. C++ is there, and so is .NET.
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Yahoo has value, just not all that much (Score:5, Interesting)
Yahoo does have some value to Microsoft. Its news, weather, and finance services are widely used. Users of those services overlap with Microsoft's customer base, and are good advertising targets for the things Microsoft sells.
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Yahoo does have some value to Microsoft. Its news, weather, and finance services are widely used. Users of those services overlap with Microsoft's customer base, and are good advertising targets for the things Microsoft sells.
Unfortunately they (and everyone else) can develop and implement those services themselves at a fraction of the cost of acquiring them from Yahoo.
Re:Yahoo has value, just not all that much (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well, maybe the user base. Since Yahoo is using Microsoft's search engine technology, all Microsoft would be really doing is buying its indirect customer base.
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Just offer something better*, and you'll see all those users change services, and the name lose all the value it now has. The only service Yahoo offers that users can't change easily is email.
* Better from the point of view of the users, obviously. Of course, I don't know what that means, If I knew, I'd be making it, not posting here.
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APPLE should buy them (Score:5, Insightful)
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But who wants to use Yahoo anymore?
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And from the same website, the highest share of traffic comes from:
mail.yahoo.com 46.68%
search.yahoo.com 23.99%
yahoo.com 23.55%
login.yahoo.com 26.03%
news.yahoo.com 14.11%
answers.yahoo.com 14.15%
finance.yahoo.com 6.40%
fantasysports.yahoo.com 1.90%
sports.yahoo.com 5.82%
cn.yahoo.com 1.74%
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I use, and a lot.
Its email sevice is better than gmail, by the way. It simply works, intead of globering the browser with uneeded javascript and changing every default action of every UI element.
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I use, and a lot.
Its email sevice is better than gmail, by the way. It simply works, intead of globering the browser with uneeded javascript and changing every default action of every UI element.
To be fair, email systems in the 1980s had a better UI than gmail.
But not having ever to worry about exceeding your mailbox limit is what made gmail popular, and you can't argue with a feature like that.
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Apple is the company that should buy them, and use iOS & Lion to do w/ them what WP7 does w/ Bing and Android does w/ Google. That's the only buyer that makes sense. Otherwise, which Yahoo! services are so valuable to make it worth adding another redundant search engine to the ones they already have? Hotjobs? Yahoo! Groups? Which ones?
Why? When they can just lock their user base into an iSearch, iJobs, iGroups? The interface will look even better and the search results will essentially be the same anyway.
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Why? When they can just lock their user base into an iSearch, iJobs, iGroups? The interface will look even better and the search results will essentially be the same anyway.
Okay, I think you're missing the point here. There is no iSearch, iJobs, or iGroups. Apple doesn't have spiders crawling the Net or a big index of results already built up. The grandparent poster is suggesting Apple buy Yahoo and rebrand all their properties as you suggest rather than having to build them from scratch. There's no reason Apple couldn't redo the interfaces and give them hooks into OSX/iOS while keeping the valuable back end.
Re:APPLE should buy them (Score:5, Insightful)
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What did I miss?
I wish I could tell you. Maybe if you weren't so locked down...
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Is there any reason Apple has to choose one brand or the other? They can use the same technology for both and just adapt the user interface to suit the type of user. Apple can keep plugging along with Yahoo's Search and Mail as they've been running the whole time and still do a separate tier of those services for their Macintosh/i-device customer base. Plus, having control of the Yahoo properties gets Apple access to new ways of reaching potential customers (without buying ad space from someone else). Apple
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it definitely isn't the technology, not since they junked most of it and 'partnered with microsoft' to use bing for the searching.
Re:APPLE should buy them (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple doesn't have spiders crawling the Net or a big index of results already built up.
As far as know, since the Microsoft/Yahoo search deal, Yahoo doesn't have those things either. Microsoft handles that for them. Yahoo Search is now just a front end for Bing.
I suppose Apple could come up with a similar deal with Microsoft for iSearch. It's Yahoo's variety of other properties and brands that have the value now.
Re:APPLE should buy them (Score:5, Insightful)
That would have made sense the last time we went through this. Now that MS and Yahoo are in bed with each other on the search side of things I don't think yahoo has enough value for Apple to want to even consider it.
The other thing is that yahoo would seriously hurt the apple brand. Apple is about new, hip, cool, yahoo is this (by today's standards) old internet company that those of us who had geocities e-mail accounts still use as yahoo accounts. No one in the reality distortion bubble of Apple is going to see acquiring yahoo as a step forward. If yahoo were 1/10th the size and made similar products it might make sense, but on a cheap day yahoo is a 15 billion dollar buyout, and is more like a 20-25 billion buyout to get complete ownership, that's a shitload of money for a huge big outfit and culture that wouldn't really fit with Apple.
MS is a whole other ballgame. Merging yahoo and hotmail would give them a huge base to rival google with, and would bring them into a noticeable share of the search market, and give them a full on portal to the web that they've failed at miserably. All of the things wrong with yahoo for apple apply to MS, but MS has fucked up all of those things enough that buying yahoo might actually look like an improvement over whatever they can manage.
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Merging yahoo and hotmail would give them a huge base to rival google
Err, Yahoo/Rocketmail and Hotmail/Live both have more users than Gmail.
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About a month ago, I stated pretty much this same case to a co-worker when we were idly musing about yahoo's fate. Apple is in the perfect position to do this. In addition to yahoo's user base, they get the services and business model, flawed though it may be, to keep it running. In addition to the yahoo mail,. search and groups, launch iMail, iSearch and iGroups along side them and let yahoo's existing customers and advertisers subsidize it until it's ready to turn a profit.
LK
Re:APPLE should buy them (Score:4, Insightful)
There is some logic in what you say. However, if I was on Apple's board, I'd be worried about tying up a ton of management time, energy, and focus. If you buy Yahoo, you buy big headaches - morale, layoffs, merging cultures, skeletons in the closet, hundreds of decisions about what to do with different properties (virtual and physical), many new vendor relationships, new legal relationships/issues, etc.
And it wouldn't be a small purchase - we're still talking billions. Yes, Apple could afford it, but by size I mean king-sized issues. This isn't like buying some small startup with interesting tech where you roll into into yourself and six months later it's no longer part of your day-to-day worry. Buying a company the size of Yahoo will take X% of your management talent for a year or two.
The questions are (a) how big is X, and (b) is what you get for that X% worth the headache and (more importantly) the opportunity cost.
Re:APPLE should buy them (Score:5, Interesting)
I am not an Apple fanboy and will use any chance I can to ridicule Apple and its users, but I'm only being straight-up here. I know the feeling personally, because I lost a lot of respect for Java (then still overseen by SUN) when they started shoehorning the Yahoo Toolbar [java.com] in with Java installs. The move was cheap, tacky, and a huge disappointment overall.
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Ess
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Contrast that to Microsoft and Google's approach - Both brands are diluted - Microsoft buys up all its second-rate competitors and s
Re:APPLE should buy them (Score:5, Insightful)
Yahoo! Groups are widely used, as is Yahoo! mail. It's finance pages are widely used as well.
But one of the real jewels in their crown, and one most people don't associate with Yahoo - is Flickr. There's a huge community there, and it's not only one of the most powerful and fully featured photosharing sites... There's an extensive community of discussion boards as well. (These are nearly unique among the major photosharing sites AFAIK.)
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Users (Score:4, Funny)
Which is a shame, because yahoo voice chat was the best trolling on the internet. There was a bug where, if you got ignored, you could simply leave the room and come back. Those who ignored you couldn't see your posts, but they could hear your audio.
My drunken friends and I spent many a night trolling the Christian chat rooms with pornographic recordings. Here's how we'd do it:
First, every Christian chat room had its own resident loudmouth who would spout bible verses all night without relinquishing the mic. We would get him off by starting a feedback loop, placing our microphone directly in front of our speakers, causing the feedback to be fed through the windbag's speakers into his mic. The feedback would be so horrible that the guy would get off the mic.
Next, with our mic at our speakers, we would play pornographic audio snippets from porn movies. The whole room would be exposed to those awful recordings and stir up into a frenzy of anger and disgust("I have kids in here listening to this with me!") and we would sit back and laugh, porn blaring, as they ignored us one by one. Then, thanks to the aforementioned bug, we'd leave the room and go back in.
The best part was when some asshole tried to grab the mic and wouldn't relinquish it, but he wouldn't turn his speakers down so even if the whole room had ignored us, our porno-audio was still going through his speakers, into his mic, and being fed back into the room. Since he was so desperate to keep control of the mic, he lost either way, and the room was forced to hear pornographic audio.
Finally, they would get smart and turn their speakers off. Then the person on the mic would start singing while the rest of the chat room fumed and ranted around him. It's like when a kid hears something he doesn't want to, cups his hands over his ears, and goes, "la-la-la-la-LAAAAAA."
It was classic.
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You just can't appreciate the value of a good and valuable trolling.
With religious schizos there is no such thing as a "bad trolling". ^^
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Would Google want them to buy Yahoo!? (Score:1)
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Plus, hasn't Yahoo! been losing money hand over fist for the last few years.
It's the perfect synergy with what is apparently Microsoft's online strategy of seeing how much money one can loose on the internet.
It makes no sense... (Score:1)
Somehow I don't see Microsoft getting into the media business and while their online services have been hit-and-miss in the past, it isn't like Yahoo is going to bring anything of value to their online platform.
Yahoo is still relevent (Score:5, Informative)
Additionally, their patents have separate value [forbes.com] that can be quite powerful if used offensively, as all the smartphone manufacturers are doing now.
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From what I've noticed, though I don't have any data to back this up, Yahoo is significantly more popular in non-english speaking countries than Google is. Most of my Japanese friends, for example, have Yahoo mail accounts, and Yahoo Japan as their home page.
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Same in Hong Kong, Taiwan and I think in Thailand. Chinese people that I have asked about this say that they prefer the cluttered search page of Yahoo to the clean one of Google.
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It's because when they say it, it rhymes with "booger".
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This is both surprising and unsurprising to me. On the one hand Chinese web pages tend to be a clusterfuck of colours and words all over the page. But on the other hand Baidu has a very clean search engine google style and is the most popular in China. Not sure about other South East Asian countries.
Re:Yahoo is still relevent (Score:4, Informative)
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Same in Romania ... everybody has a Yahoo Messenger account (which BTW is a horrible application) and all the clueless people (most people) have a Yahoo Mail account as their main account.
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Yahoo is super popular in Japan. Even Yahoo auctions which nobody else uses outranks ebay in Japan.
Yahoo! should merge with... (Score:5, Funny)
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Microsoft + Yahoo! + AOL in the 1990s was our biggest fear. Now it is a joke. Oddly enough free market does balance itself. While people worry about things that can happen in 10 - 20 years few have the patients to wait it out.
If you are the big guy on the block you will get lasy and a new disruptive technology will come and you find one night that you are a now and old fart of a company. It will happen to Google, it will happen to Apple.
Forget user base, forget technology... (Score:1)
Already a done deal (Score:5, Interesting)
A co-worker of mine is leaving to join Yahoo on Monday. He was told yesterday that within three months he will be a Microsoft Employee. He is not best pleased as he is an Open Source devotee. He is talking with a lawyer today to see if he can walk out of the contract.
I talked to an Analyst yesterday and he says that MS are getting Yahoo on the cheal. Like $1B cheap. The rest of the money is coming from Microsoft's usual investment partners, Silverlake Capital and a Canadian company(forgot the name at the moment).
I think the model for this is the MS/Nokia deal. From my pals at Nokia, it seems that MS rules in everything but name. Many of the very scandinavian working practices are slated for being consigned to the history books.
Poison Pill Re:Already a done deal (Score:1)
I feel the same way... and I'm not even looking to work at Yahoo.. I just need to move my mail away. I'm pissed that Microsoft will have access to my archived mail and know more about me than I do.
Doesn't Yahoo delete your mail a few months after you do it?
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A co-worker of mine is leaving to join Yahoo on Monday. He was told yesterday that within three months he will be a Microsoft Employee. He is not best pleased as he is an Open Source devotee. He is talking with a lawyer today to see if he can walk out of the contract.
LO-fucking-L.
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It was a done deal the last time too. It ended up not to be that well done.
On the feet of your co-worker, I'd be concerned too. As a user of Yahoo, I'm also concerned, and living before the boat sinks. But as an expectator, I still expect the deal to not go on.
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A co-worker of mine is leaving to join Yahoo on Monday. He was told yesterday that within three months he will be a Microsoft Employee. He is not best pleased as he is an Open Source devotee.
If he's a FOSS devotee making a principled stand, what difference does it make for him that he works for one big corp or the other, so long as neither of them are Google?
If he's just afraid that there's no way to work on FOSS or using FOSS in Microsoft, then he's plainly mistaken.
Buy now....lol. (Score:2)
Yahoo is interesting because it offers up categories of things, no? I just Google, so I have no clue. Google has more than enough to absorb my time and world.
Watch Google bid it up..lol.
Microsoft is poison (Score:2)
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how could you poison yahoo?
seriously.
the only yahoo service worth shit (for users) is flickr.
and to the ac's.. his friend is an idiot, didn't he check at all where he was going to work(open source devotee, has problems for working for ms but not for yahoo? wtf, I hope he's trolling) and wtf, he could walk out on the contract if he is just starting there. provided he has another job to go to.
"I think the model for this is the MS/Nokia deal. From my pals at Nokia, it seems that MS rules in everything but name
Is title a brokeback mountain reference? (Score:2)
If the reference is that Microsoft wants to sodomize Yahoo ala Jake Gyllenhaal's gay cowboy character then sir I offer you a hearty golf clap indeed.
Makes sense (Score:4, Interesting)
Every time Microsoft tries to buy Yahoo and then changes it's mind, Yahoo's stock value plunges. Do this enough times and eventually they can pick up Yahoo for pocket change.
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Huh, mod parent Interesting.
Microsoft wants the emails (Score:1)
What a great idea. (Score:2)
After buying Yahoo, it is rumored that Microsoft plans to buy Myspace, Pets.com, and the patent rights to Betamax.
yahoo? (Score:1)
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Are you retarded or just trying to look as if?
The GGP insinuated that the jewish and "christ"ian religions have no violent past. Now, taking into account that "christ"ian atrocities have continued roughly until 600-500 years ago, and islam is roughly 600 years younger than "christ"ianity, give the muslims a few centuries to become civilized, k?
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I am not sure what you are saying here. That murder and killing is alight because the Crusaders and Inquisition did it in medieval times (so we could start doing it again ourselves), or that everyone should get a turn at being murderous and uncivilised so that we should just let the Muslims get on with it?
Are you retarded or just trying to look as if?
The GGP insinuated that the jewish and "christ"ian religions have no violent past. Now, taking into account that "christ"ian atrocities have continued roughly until 600-500 years ago, and islam is roughly 600 years younger than "christ"ianity, give the muslims a few centuries to become civilized, k?
OK so you are going with the second option of saying that the Muslims should have a turn at being murderous uncivilised barbarians. Personally I son't think it retarded to hope that freedom and tolerance should be extended to everyone, but seeing that this is your opinion can I ask how far we should permit this barbarism for the next couple of centuries. Should we just let them kill non Muslims for their belief in Muslim countries? Or should we also allow them to commit honour killings within the Muslim com
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OK so you are going with the second option of saying that the Muslims should have a turn at being murderous uncivilised barbarians.
And you've gone with the first option of actually being retarded - christian style.
Nowhere did I say they should be allowed that. I only think christians and jews should stop being so sanctimonious having (not even really completely) just only become "civilised". And stop shoving their way of life down everyone's throats.
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OK so you are going with the second option of saying that the Muslims should have a turn at being murderous uncivilised barbarians.
And you've gone with the first option of actually being retarded - christian style.
I can see that not having an answer you resort to insults. You are wrong on all counts here because I am not a Christian.
Nowhere did I say they should be allowed that. I only think christians and jews should stop being so sanctimonious having (not even really completely) just only become "civilised". And stop shoving their way of life down everyone's throats.
Funny way to tell them not to be sanctimonious (which I agree they often are) - by saying that we should "give the muslims a few centuries to become civilized".
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The people who commit "honour killings" do so because of tribal cultural traditions which predate Islam and have survived due to poverty and lack of education. Most Muslims from more advanced/civilized countries would condemn them outright.
Yes that's why there are dozens of honour killings by Muslims in the UK each year" [wikipedia.org]. And before you try the "they're not all Muslim" thing, there have been many dozen Muslim honour killings, one Christian, one Hindu and a few Sikh
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I expect you are talking about fighting Muslim terrorists who started it, which should be allowed.
The logical error that Bush and Blair made was to say that because the 9/11 terrorists were Muslim, therefore all Muslims are terrorists, therefore we are entitled to invade Iraq and Afghanistan because they have Muslim governments we don't like with some sort of tenuous link to Al Qaida.
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it is better for Muslim countries to be controlled by a dictator than by an Islamic theocracy.
Yeah, why should they have their own version of democracy, the fucking foreign bastards?
We know best, and it was rather unsporting of the so-called "democratic protesters" in the Arab Spring to get rid of some good friends of the West.
The next thing you know, Johnny Foreigner will be wanting to control his own country's economic resources!
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Sure, and I'm sure Jooooos & Xtians have all the baggage like honor killings, FGMs, jihad violence against infidels, beheadings, conviction of raped women on adultery charges, and a whole lot more! One more of the 'there are no differences' bullshi'ite!
The vast majority of Muslims do not believe in or support those things. It's like saying that all Christians are fundamentalist nutjobs who think the world is 6000 years old and homosexuality is a sin that should be punished by stoning because it says it in the Bible somewhere.
The supernatural elements of Islam are virtually identical with Christianity anyway. Again, it depends how literally you want to take them, but if you believe in a single omnipotent god, whether you call him God or Allah is irrele
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Which may or may not be true, but the OP was singling out Muslims.
LK
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Post.
Also yahoo isnt that bad of a company. I get the feeling that they think it will add some more "not google" market share.
And thats fine by me.
I'd prefer it to also be "not Microsoft".
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Post.
Also yahoo isnt that bad of a company. I get the feeling that they think it will add some more "not google" market share.
And thats fine by me.
I'd prefer it to also be "not Microsoft".
At this stage, "not Google" is as important as "not Apple" and rather more important than "not Microsoft".
Microsoft were/are evil (I've lost track) because they had a monopoly, it wasn't the fact that Microsoft were evil and just happened to have a monopoly on desktop OS as well.
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