Ballmer! explains! hostile! Yahoo! bid!
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'We've been engaged for months' !!! Steve Ballmer all but confirmed that Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo! for scale, branding and audience rather than any technology or products the web media co owns.â¦
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The most painful kind of generosity are the promises you cannot fulfill. The people who were once so grateful then turn on you, and your self-esteem is sure to take a beating.  Many years ago, in a fit of generosity, Dave Winer offered to host all early-bird adopters of editthispage.com free hosting of their weblogs. This included php.weblogs.com. Well Dave Winer recently announced that he was closing down the weblogs.com and editthispage.com websites. He no longer runs a company that can support these sites and they are a personal and financial strain on him.   I was disappointed, but I had no expectations that Dave would do this in perpetuity.  My momma taught me to keep my expectations low when it comes to free things. After all, Dave and I have never met, and I've only exchanged a couple of emails with him.   I had a feeling that something like this was going to happen because the site has suffering from poor performance this past month. So my contingency plan was to ship the weblog to a commercial hosting service like weblogger if need be. During the weekend, just before the site was cut off, and before any announcement by Dave, I moved my most important open source project to sourceforge, to http://adodb.sourceforge.net/.  Today I got an email from Lawrence, Userland's webmaster:  Subject:   php.weblogs.com  From:      "Lawrence Lee" deleted#userland.com Date:      Wed, June 16, 2004 1:46 am  To:        jlim#natsoft.com Priority:  Normal  Mailer:    Microsoft Office Outlook, Build 11.0.5510   We'll be continuing to host php.weblogs.com, we made special arrangements with Dave to keep it running.  Lawrence   I didn't ask for special treatment, so this is a pleasant surprise. Apparently the people at Userland decided to host this weblog and Dave emailed me, saying he had nothing to do with this decision. Of course I don't expect this offer to be permanent either, and I will deal with that when the time comes. The website's performance is still terrible though, and I have no expectations about this either.  For those who ever wondered what the icon below each post means, it's a graphic emoticon of how i feel. I think the jazz singer Billie Holiday is an appropriate image for this post; her songs are always bitter-sweet. It sure feels like Stormy Weather or Come Rain or Shine.  I would also like to thank those of you who emailed me privately about this issue. RSS seems the best  way to access this web-site at the moment, as it continues to go down at random times.
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Big Goo's spurning Yahoo!'s business? Don't believe it.
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The software maker lets a few details out during an employee Web cast to discuss Yahoo bid. It's just one of many product tidbits I expect to come out as part of regulatory filings associated with the offer.
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Buying, selling, jumping, and dumping -- it's been a busy week in technology. And like the news, this quiz has Yahoo all over it. Can you acquire a perfect score? It's harder than it looks. Award yourself 10 points for each correct answer (sorry, no partials this time). Ready? Then get cracking.1. It turns out Yahoo isn't emotionally unavailable, it's just playing hard to get. What did Yahoo hint would help Microsoft close the deal?a. A seat on the Microsoft board for Jerry Yang b. $40 a share c. Retaining Yahoo brands (don't forget the exclamation point!) d. A restraining order keeping Steve Ballmer 800 miles from SunnyvaleTake the InfoWorld news quiz
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Plus: eBay outlines policy on racist language. [News.com Extra]
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way. Nobody&#39;s exactly sure why or how the FBI got warrants to take Indymedia&#39;s HDs, but their
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Microsoft said&#160;its $44.6 billion offer to purchase Yahoo&#160;is &quot;fair&quot; and hinted that it may pursue a hostile takeover of the Internet company, according to a statement Microsoft made Monday in response to&#160;Yahoo&#39;s formal rejection of its buyout offer.In a statement, Microsoft said it&#39;s &quot;unfortunate&quot; that Yahoo &quot;has not embraced&quot; its proposal to combine the two companies, and the rejection of the offer &quot;does not change our belief in the strategic and financial merits of our proposal.&quot;The company also hinted that it may take the offer directly to Yahoo&#39;s shareholders, a move that could result in a hostile takeover.&quot;As we have said previously, Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo&#39;s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal,&quot; Microsoft said in its statement.Earlier Monday, Yahoo formally rejected Microsoft&#39;s bid to acquire the company in a half-stock/half-cash purchase, saying it undervalued Yahoo.On Feb. 1, Microsoft offered to pay $31 per share for half of Yahoo&#39;s outstanding shares in cash -- about $22.3 billion -- and 0.9509 of a Microsoft share for the other half. Microsoft&#39;s half-cash/half-stock offer to Yahoo was valued at about $44.6 billion at the time it was made; Yahoo&#39;s share price was $19.18 at the time.However, since then Microsoft&#39;s stock has gone down while Yahoo&#39;s has risen, making the deal, under its current terms, worth less than when it was originally offered. This led to speculation that Yahoo might look for other suitors; the company is reportedly looking for about $40 per share. Yahoo&#39;s share price closed at $29.87 Monday; Microsoft&#39;s closed at $28.21.Some have speculated that Microsoft would raise its offer to the company to about $35 per share -- about midway between its original offer and Yahoo&#39;s target price -- but in its statement on Monday, the company seemed adamant about keeping the offer as it stands.&quot;We are offering shareholders superior value and the opportunity to participate in the upside of the combined company,&quot; Microsoft said. &quot;Based on conversations with stakeholders of both companies, we are confident that moving forward promptly to consummate a transaction is in the best interests of all parties.&quot;Microsoft&#39;s offer to purchase Yahoo is an attempt to join forces and improve both companies&#39; positions against Google in online advertising and services. However, many questioned both the logistical complexity and cultural differences involved in combining the companies, and there are fears that it will thwart rather than help their efforts to compete with Google.Yahoo is reportedly in talks with both AOL and Google to try to avoid being acquired by Microsoft. Analysts said Monday that Yahoo&#39;s initial rejection of the offer is more of an attempt to elicit a higher bid -- either from Microsoft or another company. If none comes, the company might decide in the future to accept Microsoft&#39;s offer as it stands, they said.
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Out Googling Google on bespoke scale Comment Should Microsoft's bid for Yahoo! go through, the combined company would face one very major infrastructure question - how far is it willing to go in the war against Google?â¦Learn &amp; Contribute, Live &amp; Online - The Register Debates Green Computing
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Yahoo Search Marketing just sent out the following email which alerts its advertisers to the changes in bid management from the current &#8216;auction PPC&#8217; format to the new Yahoo Search Marketing &#8216;Estimated Average Position&#8217; and Bid Range for Top Positions.&#8217;   Dear Advertiser, As you will soon notice when you log into your Sponsored Search account, we [...]
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Members of the Yahoo-owned website Flickr, the web's most unique and outspoken photo-sharing community, are still enraged at the thought of the property falling into the hands of Microsoft. The software giant's $44.6 billion takeover bid for Yahoo is almost a week old, but Flickr's hatred for Redmond is still as fresh as day one.
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Yahoo! must consider the Microsoft deal on the table.
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Blog: Those who consider acquiring an open source company must be careful not to upset the associated open source community.  Is there such thing as a hostile takeover in open source?
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&#39;You suck! You&#39;re a piece of &amp;%$#*! You can&#39;t play worth *$#!% you loser, so SIT DOWN!!!&quot; That&#39;s what a guy was yelling at a visiting player during a White Sox-Angels game earlier this summer.
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Links to the week's topics from search engine forums across the web: New Yahoo Bidding Information - Internet Advertisers Want Sales Not Branding - Strategy Needed for New International Site - Yahoo Integrates Answers Into Search Results, and more.
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Blog: Customers are angry over new, large ads in AT&#38;T/Yahoo DSL service.
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Please quote me on this Stob There's another of those lists of supposedly amusing/sage/cute adagesÂ going around, bouncing from blog to email, accumulating fresh contributions and occasional edits and doing all the meme-ish things that memes do. This one differs from all the others that you have deleted irritably from your email inbox in that it includes a contribution taken from this very column.â¦