Logitech up on Microsoft bid talk, analysts wary
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Shares in Swiss-based computer peripherals maker Logitech International SA rose as much as 12 percent on Thursday based on speculation Microsoft Corp would launch a takeover bid, traders said.
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Microsoft is mulling an investment of up to 5.0 percent in the social networking site Facebook, a move that could set the stage for confrontation with rival Google, the Wall Street Journal reported.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft may end up having to raise the amount it is willing to pay for Yahoo if the software company's stock continues to drop while Yahoo's continues to rise.
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Technology stocks rose on Tuesday,  helped by Veritas Corp. VRTS.O after a report the software  company was close to being acquired, while blue chips were  little changed as investors awaited an expected interest-rate  hike.
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With Yahooâs shares up slightly on the news that its board has officially rejected the $31 a share bid from Microsoft, it appears investors are betting the company is looking for a better deal.
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Shares of electronics maker Kenwood Corp. &lt;6765.T&gt; jumped as much as 10 percent on Monday on news it has resumed talks with Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. &lt;6752.T&gt; to buy a stake in JVC &lt;6792.T&gt; after a deal with private equity firm Texas Pacific...
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Research in Motion Ltd    moved higher on Thursday on renewed market speculation  that Microsoft Corp  could be interested in buying the  BlackBerry maker.
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Thanks to a decline in Microsoft shares, the stock portion of the company's offer has dropped. That means that as of now Microsoft is offering less than it was four days ago. To match its original $31 per share offer, Microsoft would have to boost the exc
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Shares on Wall Street are expected to open higher on Tuesday, taking a cue from a strong performance in European and Asian markets, while bid talk takes the top slot in a thin day for company events.
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Now that Yahoo is apparently in play, and talk among Wall Street Insiders touches on big names such as Google, Amazon, and AOL, Yahoo apparently feels all the talk has elevated its value high enough where it can afford to say no to Microsoft.
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Guests from Logitech and ViewSonic will appear on radio talk show Let's Talk Computers.  Logitech (NASDAQ: LOGI) (SWX: LOGN) designs, manufactures and markets personal peripherals that enable people to effectively work, play, and communicate in the digital world.
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BOSTON/SEATTLE  - Yahoo Inc's  second-biggest shareholder urged Microsoft Corp  to raise its $42 billion bid for the Web pioneer and warned Yahoo it has few options other than to accept, raising pressure for them to seal a deal.
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Speculation of a bidding war drove   the shares in Australia's Vision Systems Ltd. VSL.AX up well   above the most recent offer on Wednesday, as a third company   said it was looking at buying the diagnostics firm.
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Many Yahoo shareholders are waiting for a higher bid than that offered by Microsoft, but analysts say it is increasingly unlikely.
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Microsoft&#39;s $44.6 billion offer to purchase Yahoo&#160;is a dramatic statement from a company that delayed acknowledging the importance of emerging Web business models for so long, it faced becoming an also-ran in the Web 2.0 economy.But the cultural implications of the move are so tricky that the deal could end up backfiring for both vendors if Microsoft doesn&#39;t take care to learn from its past and use Yahoo to transform its business and&#160;not just help bolster its unproven efforts in online advertising and hosted services.The unprecedented deal, which would put a sizable dent in Microsoft&#39;s wallet, would be the largest purchase ever for the company. If Microsoft is willing to spend that much money, it also has to be willing to change some old ways of thinking to make the most out of the investment, analysts say.To achieve this, analysts caution Microsoft to be careful not to view Yahoo as a one-trick pony, taken onboard only for its user base and infrastructure to bolster Microsoft&#39;s online advertising interests against Google. While this is certainly the primary reason for the deal, to make the most of it, Microsoft has to not only respect the strength of Yahoo&#39;s brand but also be willing to let go of some of its own traditional proprietary interests -- not just on the product side but in its culture as well.Microsoft has never been one to let go of its vision or proprietary interests too easily; when acquiring companies, it usually subsumes the products and services and brands them as its own.While this has worked in the past because Microsoft traditionally has shied away from acquiring big-name or big-ticket items --&#160;last year&#39;s $6 billion aQuantive deal&#160;was a notable exception -- it&#39;s not as simple to do this with a company like Yahoo, analysts said.In the areas of online search and particular services and as an online destination for users, Yahoo is a stronger brand than Microsoft. Microsoft must recognize this and be willing to give up some of its interest in new content and services branded, respectively, under MSN and Windows Live to make the deal successful, said Ned May, director and lead analyst for market research firm Outsell.&quot;The big question is, will Microsoft take this and recognize it for being a stronger property and migrate its efforts there, or will it try to push its own efforts out through Yahoo?&quot; he asked. &quot;Historically, there&#39;s no precedent for it to do anything but use [an acquired company] to get Microsoft&#39;s message out.&quot;Though Microsoft and Yahoo are different types of companies and the union itself makes much more sense, Ron Schmelzer, analyst and managing partner with Zapthink, likened the deal to Time Warner-AOL, in which AOL&#39;s brand was damaged, not enhanced, after all was said and done.But investing as much as the gross domestic product of some countries in one company could inspire Microsoft to &quot;change its stripes&quot; and rethink its own interests, he said.To make the deal a true success, Microsoft also has to prove that it can let go of its entrenched Windows OS and desktop software culture, which had been the anchor keeping Microsoft from moving more quickly against Google and Yahoo in online advertising and services in the first place, Schmelzer said.&quot;The application itself is moving away from the thing that sits captive on your desktop to the thing that&#39;s distributed on the Internet,&quot; he said. &quot;Microsoft has to rid itself of its &#39;80s and &#39;90s perspective -- which was great in the &#39;80s and &#39;90s, but now 80 percent of the value of the computer is not in the computer itself.&quot;Microsoft had been moving in this direction before Friday&#39;s news, but it has been burdened by its need to keep the customers of two of its biggest consumer products -- Windows and Office -- happy, as well as its enormous portfolio of enterprise and business customers. Instead of moving full bore into the Web, Microsoft had adopted a &quot;software plus services&quot; strategy as a nod to its software legacy and inability to move fully to a more services-oriented strategy because of it.Still, some think an entire cultural shift isn&#39;t necessary for Microsoft to make the most out of the deal. David Mitchell Smith, vice president and fellow at Gartner, said Microsoft can leverage Yahoo successfully without changing its usual way of doing things, by keeping the brand and merging the best parts of Yahoo&#39;s Internet business, such as its online content, advertising and search, with its online services efforts.&quot;I would expect to see the Yahoo brand come out of this very, very strong,&quot; he said. In particular, Microsoft has been making moves to drive more video and other multimedia content online through MSN, and that is one area where the company could give up its own identity in favor of Yahoo&#39;s, Smith said.Andrew Brust, chief, new technology for consulting firm twentysix New York, said that the combination of Microsoft&#39;s existing Web technology and the Yahoo brand would be &quot;nicely complementary,&quot; though he acknowledged the risks of such a union. Even so, &quot;risk aversion is not a good Internet strategy,&quot; Brust said. Taking a risk in this area as well as bringing &quot;some truly Internet-focused mindset into the corporate culture&quot; may be just what Microsoft needs.Others likened the deal to another risky one, HP-Compaq, which many feared would be a disaster because of product overlap and cultural differences. That deal eventually proved successful.However, it&#39;s important to keep in mind how much more of a role that culture and the cool factor plays on the Internet than it does in the world of traditional computer hardware, warned Outsell&#39;s May. He said Yahoo users may be put off by the notion of Microsoft as their new daddy and see Google as the lesser of two evils, which would defeat the notion of the Microsoft-Yahoo union in the first place.
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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer rebuffed&#160;Google&#39;s accusations&#160;that an acquisition of Yahoo would be anticompetitive.The bid was made public Friday, prompting the response from Google over the weekend. Ballmer Monday at a news conference ceded ground to Microsoft&#39;s arch rival in order to justify his company&#39;s&#160;$44.6 billion cash-and-stock offer for Yahoo,&#160;which if accepted would fall under the scrutiny of U.S. and European regulators.&quot;Google&#39;s clearly got a dominant position,&quot; Ballmer said. &quot;They have about 75 percent of paid search worldwide. We think this enhances competition and anything else would be less good.&quot;A Google executive struck back at Microsoft on Sunday, charging that a combined Microsoft and Yahoo would control an overwhelming share of e-mail and instant-messaging accounts as well as portal traffic.David Drummond, senior vice president of corporate development and chief legal officer at Google, further suggested that if Microsoft buys Yahoo it might try to unfairly use its dominance in those areas, just as it did in the PC market.Monday&#39;s news conference, in which Ballmer spoke with Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell, appeared to put further pressure on Yahoo&#39;s board to accept the offer, which at $31 a share represents a 62 percent premium over Yahoo&#39;s closing price last Thursday.&quot;We think it&#39;s an extremely competitive offer,&quot; Liddell said.In a Monday filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Yahoo disclosed an e-mail sent on Friday by CEO Jerry Yang and Roy Bostock, non-executive chairman of Yahoo&#39;s board. &quot;First, we want to emphasize that absolutely no decisions have been made and, despite what some people have tried to suggest, there&#39;s certainly no integration process under way,&quot; the e-mail read.Ballmer continued with a hard push as to how a deal with Yahoo will let Microsoft move faster in building out areas such as search, online services and online advertising.&quot;We are going to have to innovate like crazy,&quot; Ballmer said.But he also stressed how long it could take for a Yahoo deal to eventually benefit shareholders. Ballmer said he looks at whether investments will pay off five to 10 years down the line, but investors often want to see results in three years.&quot;Sometimes those investments look smart, sometimes it takes a while for them to pay off,&quot; Ballmer said.
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European equities inched cautiously higher on Friday as bid talk lifted the banking sector and airlines got a boost after Ryanair made a surprise offer for newly-listed Aer Lingus.