Microsoft! offers! Yahoo! less! Microsoft said yesterday that a deal with Yahoo!, but not a full-blown acquisition, is still very much on the table. Although it refused to rule out a possible buyout, Microsoft issued a statement saying it was discussing alternative deals with Yahoo!. Microsoft is considering and has raised with Yahoo! an alternative that …
Too soon Balmer. Too soon.
Crikey, why is it that these board room types behave like hormone saturated teenagers trying to get their hands inside a pair of knickers? If they want to get Downstairs Inside then have a little patience - it will cost a lost less in the long run. To slightly paraphrase John Cleese, "You don't stampede for the Clitoris!"
Leave it a while and they'll snatch your hand off Balmer. They may even respect you in the morning as well.
"Yahoo! is under pressure from Carl Icahn, who is pushing to replace its board of directors in favour of one which supports the takeover."
You mean cheaper, sell out cheaper. The current board said it was worth more to Microsoft, they wouldn't drop the price to the offer price Microsoft was prepared to offer. They're the top site on the web, the most visited site, and Microsoft offer was a fraction of Google's price, the second most visited site.
So Carl wants to put in a board to roll over and discount to the price Microsoft wants to pay. And if he replaces the board and Microsoft put in a low bid? What then, what happens when the board is only capable of selling out and not capable of building the business? Microsoft will have him over a barrel, he will have a board in place that is only capable of selling the business and not running it. He will have devalued Yahoo, and he'll have to accept whatever low bid Microsoft deems to offer.
Ballmer is showing desperation, he's getting angrier and fatter. There are plenty more search engines out there he could gobble up for lunch.
Moo! just was never meant to be. Ballmer seems to forget that Google and Yahoo! were once friends around '99 '00 so it wouldn't be hard for them to rebuild their relationship.
Yahoo do do more than flickr ... they have yahoo pipes as well ...
http://pipes.yahoo.com
(look for 'Milax') allows me to translate an RSS feed on the fly from russian, and then change the links so that the resulting pages are displayed via googles translation tools.
apart from that, i wouldn't touch yahoo with a barge pole, and would be happy for the beast to acquire them so that they both lose money :)
Well, I don't often use their search engine myself, I'll admit, mostly because it used to get less relevent returns to my queries than Google some five years ago. I don't know if that would be true now though.
Yahoo are still my first choice when it comes to shake'n'bake specialised social networking, and I often tout Yahoo Groups to others as a quick and esay way to get some quite sophisticated tech for a web presence with automated mail-listing for free.
There's plenty I'd do differently if I was building any one of my own Yahoo Groups by hand, and some of the recent changes have been rather counter productive, but then, I wanted to be up and running in minutes so I could dedicate more free time to my interests and less to dicking about with website crap so I was willing to live with the less-great stuff to get that.
I wouldn't doubt they loose money on it though. The garbage-collection criteria favoured eternal spam wastelands the last time I investigated shutting down a group whose owner had just walked off without delegating a replacement. I wonder just how much of the spinning real estate is actually weed-infested landfill? Perhaps an audit would do more for shareholder value than yelling for a new board?
If you want to have a go at the so-called experts in the so-called tech support department then I'm with you 100%. Douglas Adams could only dream of such monumental levels of incompetence and apathy.
When Yahoo put out a new template a couple of years ago that resized all group logo pictures to bedsheets (which was a problem for mine since I went for quick-loading postage stamps when I built 'em and the resulting fuzzy mess made some of the older readers think they needed new specs) I played around for a couple of days then gave up and asked how to size the art smaller. The reply?
"Reduce the size of the image".
It has just occurred to me that this sort of tech support may have been part of the attraction from Microsoft's point of view: at least one part of the organisation was already aligned with the Redmond Way of Things and wouldn't need reindoctrinating.
That's all Ballmer wants.
Ballmer is Google -obsessed. He does not like it that MSN < Google.
(MSN + Yahoo) > Google, therefore Ballmer wants that to happen.
Of course, both MSN and Yahoo are sliding, while Google is growing. Therefore the above equation only works for a while. When it gets to the stage that (MSN + Yahoo) < Google, then Ballmer won't offer 50c per share for YHOO, let alone $25+.
So one week he can't live without Yahoo. The next he declares that it's fine with him if they won't sell out, because he doesn't really want them anyway. And now he's back desperately trying to get in on the action again! Pete James is right... It's like they're teenage boys trying to get "some".
Flickr and Groups are pretty much all I use of Yahoo, but if Ballmer gets his bloated bald head involved in them, I'll be out faster than he can say "Developers".
Sure I'll be the ultimate loser in leaving those services, but it's really the principal of the thing. My CC licensed photos pose an interesting question though... Can I legally remove them from Flickr if someone has used them?
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