Yahoo May Buy Facebook
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By Constance Loizos, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.  Sep. 22--Facebook, the social-networking start-up popular with high  school and college students, is on the verge of being purchased by Yahoo,  according to two sources with knowledge of the deal.
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Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo for around $44.6 billion in cash and shares, to better compete with Google in the market for online services.
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Yahoo to purchase website geared towards creating online competitions.
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Microsoft Corp. has offered to buy struggling internet search provider Yahoo for $44.6 billion, a merger that would combine two of the technology world's most well-known names into a potentially potent competitor for Google in the lucrative Web search and advertising market.
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Google could help keep Yahoo away from Microsoft if it took over selling search ads for Yahoo in return for a very large check. That money could help finance all sorts of possible deals.
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By CONSTANCE LOIZOS  Facebook, the social-networking start-up popular with high school and college students, is on the verge of being purchased by Yahoo, according to two sources with knowledge of the deal.
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Microsoft is in talks to buy a stake in the social networking site Facebook, the Wall Street Journal says.
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Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. recently discussed swapping its MySpace social-networking site in exchange for a large stake in Yahoo, according to published reports.
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Yahoo Buying Facebook for $1 Billion Still think Yahoo is having money problems? According to an article published by the BBC, Yahoo is incredibly close to sealing a one billion dollar deal with Facebook, the social networking site.  A Facebook acquisition would add yet another strong community offering to the Yahoo Social Media family, which now [...]
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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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Social-networking Web site   Facebook.com is in serious talks to sell itself to Internet   media company Yahoo Inc. YHOO.O for an amount that could   approach $1 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported on   Thursday.
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SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK  - Microsoft Corp offered to buy Yahoo Inc for $44.6 billion, in a bold bid to transform two ailing Internet businesses into a worthy competitor for market leader Google Inc.
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Technology giant Microsoft Corp said  on Friday that it had offered to acquire Internet media company  Yahoo Inc for $44.6 billion in cash and stock.
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NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO  - Yahoo Inc  is in  talks on a possible deal with News Corp , but analysts  said an alternative was unlikely to emerge to rival Microsoft  Corp's  bid for Yahoo, now valued at $42.1 billion.
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Believe it or not, Microsoft isn't really serious in its bid to buy Yahoo, according to one financial analyst, who says the proposal is really just a ploy to fend off a potential deal between Yahoo and Amazon. Could he possibly be right? Probably not.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft has approached FacebookÂ in recent weeks proposing an investment that would give Microsoft a stake of up to 5 percent in the popular social-networking company, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. With Microsoft willing to invest between $300 million and $500 million, the deal would value Facebook at $10 billion or more, the Journal reported, quoting anonymous sources. Google has also expressed an interest in acquiring a Facebook stake recently, according to the Journal. Thus, Microsoft could find itself competing for Facebook's attention with Google. However, Facebook's discussions with Google and Microsoft are in the early stages and could end up with no agreement with either suitor, according to the Journal. IDG News Service's requests for comment from Facebook, Microsoft, and Google weren't immediately answered. Founded in February 2004, Facebook is one of the world's most popular social-networking sites with about 42 million active users. Facebook has been growing strongly in the past 12 months. In December, it had about 12 million active users. The site initially only admitted students, but last September it lifted that restriction. In May of this year, itÂ opened up to third-party developersÂ to create applications for the site, which has also added to its popularity with users. Along the way, it has caught the attention of big Internet playersÂ such asÂ Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo. The latter reportedly tried to buy Facebook last year for $1 billion. Facebook's attractiveness is that it builds very strong and deep relationships with its users.Â More thanÂ half of its active members return to the site daily, and Facebook knows a lot about them, thanks to all the personal information people disclose on their site profiles and interactions with other members. This, in turn, offers a desirable audience to advertisers and to ad sellers and distributorsÂ such asÂ Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. A little more than a year ago,Â Facebook chose Microsoft to display banner adsÂ on the site. Facebook would be interested in using the cash raised from selling a stake for buying other companies, increasing its staff of about 300, and beefing up its technical infrastructure, the Journal reported. Facebook is also weighing the option of raising funds from financial investors, the Journal said.
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Internet search firm Yahoo   could see its shares rise sharply in the coming year as  investors pay greater heed to its array of money-making  services, Barron&#039;s said in its May 22 edition.