Posts by Martin Baines

Yahoo! and Microsoft terminate talks, this time for good

Yahoo shareholders can do better???

"Good riddence, MS has no winning Internet element Yahoo needs and if they won't pay big cash, Yahoo shareholders can do better."

Really? $23 today. On the table was $33 and now it appears back in 2007 $40 was on the table. Look pretty much like the Yahoo! board missed the boat and are guilty of serious misjudgement to me in maximising the value for their shareholders.

Now I might wonder what on earth Microsoft's board is doing letting them make such outrageously high bids for Yahoo! but that is a completely different matter. Yahoo! shareholders would have been much better off taking the $40 offer and getting the hell out while a misguided merger crashed and burned. As it is it looks to me like Yahoo! will suffer a long slow painful decline before eventually being aquired for way less than these figures. As for Microsoft - a slow mamouth that is probably better of without the distraction of trying to integrate Yahoo!

MP accuses BBC chief of illegally championing Microsoft

It only takes one cow....

... push open the gate.

"Even with a 10-15 second ad at the start/end, very few people would bother seeking out illicitly-distributed versions if the iPlayer downloads were otherwise equivalent or higher-quality" but if even just one of the people who downloaded this unprotected material copied it outside the BBC's licence for it the BBC could be held liable for all the copyright holders loss. At which point no doubt the same people who whine about DRM now would be complaining about the loss of licence payers money to settle the damages awarded by a US court.

No one likes DRM in use but without it being written into contracts it's pretty unlikely a lot of TV material would be licensed for online access to the BBC (or any other broadcaster for that matter).

O2 starts charging for calls to non-places

Charges for 0800 calls

The jucstifaction for this in the early days was that although the called party pays, they effectively only pay for the cost of a landline call not a mobile call.

In the days when all mobile calls were charged for it was JUST possible to accept this arguement. E.g if (say) Vodafone connected a call to a BT landline they only got the equivalent of a landline call rate for the call from the called party (bia the BT interconnect agreement), not their full mobile rate (which was of course MUCH higher and is now.... well only much higher:-)). But given that today calls to geographic numbers are often bundled in with call packages there is no real justification as calls to an 0800 number cost no more to terminate (or in fact might less) than an 01 or 02 number. The only justifcation now is: "because we can".

I've long felt "free" numbers being universally free is an area the regulator should have looked at years ago.