Yahoo Deal Is Big, but Is It the Next Big Thing?
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In Silicon Valley, buying rather than building is regarded as counter to the reinvention culture.
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If you search for Yahoo Microsoft, this page is the second hit. I like that of course. It's generating a fair amount of flow, since the combination of Yahoo and Microsoft is a pretty hot topic. Keeping the topic going, I think it's pretty amazing that Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo, but then again, which of all their web efforts has captured our imagination? At least Yahoo has Flickr, and when they try something new, we all try it with them (often with not the greatest results). The rambling continues... If Yahoo is into poison pills, try this one out.  Reserve 5 percent of Yahoo's common stock for blogger options. Put us to work to find new businesses for Yahoo, ones that are relevant to our world. When we find them, reward the bloggers with a significant upside stake in Yahoo's future, not the airy-fairy kind, but real stock that we can trade. Handled properly, it could raise shareholder value by much more than 5 percent. Just the kind of deal they pay you to do, oh Yahoo gods and board members.  Of course it'll never happen. It's an idea like the one I keep proposing for newspapers -- that they hire their public editors from the public, independent bloggers with no journalism experience, with no undue reverence for the institutions so revered by journos. They're going away, just like Yahoo is (sad but true). Now what will rise in their place? Imho, something that's home grown, with the integrity of the people, in our interest. The more they invite the public in, the more clued in they will be when we figure out where we want to go with news on the web. It's why I'm excited about the Obama campaign and why I keep giving to it (I'm up to $400 now). I'm excited because so many other people are excited.  I like his idea about tuition for public service for college students. It's so simple. People want to be involved, they want to use their energy and creativity to solve problems. In the 20th century we were couch potatoes. In the 21st we do it for ourselves.  The first tech company that fully embraces this, not just in the form of User Generated Content (what an insult) but by giving us power (that comes from stock) will rule the world. If Y! had the guts, it won't be long before they're making tender offers to buy out Ballmer.  BTW, I think I understand why Ballmer wants Yahoo! When Yahoo engineers wake up they program stuff like Yahoo Live, which is pretty cool and runs on the web, and while it steals ideas from smaller companies, it adds some pretty cool stuff of its own. When Microsoft engineers wake up they program stuff like Vista, a multi-year, multi-billion dollar waste of money, time and customer goodwill. They can't do another Vista without wrecking the franchise. Now the question is -- where do they go for growth? That's what Yahoo is for.
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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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The Motley Fool - It's no secret that Internet frenzy 2.0 has included a fair share of small Web start-ups getting bought out by Internet giants. Yahoo!'s (Nasdaq: YHOO - News) reported interest in buying social networking site Facebook last week is yet another case in point. However, craigslist founder Craig Newmark went on the record saying he's not in the least bit interested in a buyout. And guess what -- nobody should be in the least bit surprised.
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If the massive deal does go through, Google will at last face a major threat to fend off. Technical integration between Microsoft and Yahoo could be a nightmare, according to some analysts. Yet customers might stand to gain.
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A combination of Microsoft and Yahoo could reshape the Internet landscape for millions of Web users: Would the two companies join their online portals? Could they rethink the desktop computer to integrate Web content more directly?
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Microsoft's proposal to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion raises many questions. Will Yahoo accept the offer? Can Microsoft win the approval of antitrust authorities in the United States and the European Union? Can the company digest an acquisition this large without suffering an AOL-Time Warner-like...
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Is now the time to own a piece of the dominant search giant?
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Business & money: Microsoft purchase of Yahoo would create an unacceptably dominant online business, says Google
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The My Yahoo service will soon get a significant upgrade, the company's chief executive officer said today.
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A deal that gives Yahoo a new and very large distribution channel for their toolbar and will later see Yahoo search embedded in the Acrobat Reader will be announced today.
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InfoWorld - At first blush, Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Yahoo for $46.6 billion is about growing its consumer advertising and portal business to better compete wit Google.
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NEW YORK Yahoo appears to be moving a step closer to challenging Google after making a purchase of a start-up company that has developed a promising e-mail application.
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Microsoft needs to do something online--quick. But buying Yahoo! isn't enough.
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No other buyer will be willing to pay more for Yahoo. Since Yahooâs management will not be able to justify turning down that sort of premium, Microsoft is likely to win the prize.
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While observers believe that Microsoft is willing to pay Yahoo $44 billion primarily for its users and advertising base, Microsoft's chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, wants to grow its developer community as well."We respect the work Yahoo has done in the realm of creating an open development platform through its Yahoo Developer network and look forward to extending this great work to an even broader base of developers," he said during a press conference discussing Microsoft's offer on Friday.The question now is how that process would unfold. Yahoo's approach to development has indeed emphasized open source. In contrast, Microsoft has a deep investment in its proprietary .NET programming framework and Visual Studio IDE (integrated development environment). It only recently began making some overtures to the open-source community.But Microsoft also boasts a vast army of loyal developers -- something that Yahoo can't necessarily claim, although it does maintain the Yahoo Developer Network. And a Yahoo purchase clearly ties into its emerging "software-plus-services" strategy for distributing online applications.This may be a case where the pieces fit to form a serendipitous whole, according to one observer."Yahoo has the most beautiful set of [APIs] in its properties," such as for the Flickr photo-sharing site, said James Governor, an analyst with Redmonk. "But frankly, it just has not done a great job of building an ecosystem. ... there's no such thing as a 'Yahoo developer.'"Yahoo's tools hold promise but really need a high-profile evangelist pushing hard behind them, Governor argued. "The first thing I would do in taking over the company would be to get someone who really understands APIs ... to me, Jon Udell -- who is now at Microsoft -- would be ideal in this role. He would be someone I would be thinking of right away," he said.While Yahoo's APIs arguably are more consumer-oriented, they could still hold value within the average corporate shop, Governor said. "There's no reason why Flickr can't have some enterprise applicability.... For the enterprise developer, it's probably not the biggest thing in the world, but it definitely offers some cool new things."But other observers said there are obstacles as well as opportunities.John Gruber, who writes about the Web and Apple at his site, daringfireball.net, sees a major architectural clash between Microsoft and Yahoo, which has an infrastructure that incorporates Linux."I don't think Microsoft has ever bought -- and maintained -- a significant software product that wasn't written against Microsoft technology," he wrote on his blog. "So there's a paradox: Technically, I can't see how Microsoft would migrate all of Yahoo to Windows servers and software. But culturally, it just isn't in Microsoft's DNA to accept and maintain all of these PHP/FreeBSD/Linux products."Robert McLaws, a .NET developer and blogger at windows-now.com, questioned the overall wisdom of the acquisition attempt, given this inconsistency. "If one of the points in buying them is their infrastructure, but their infrastructure isn't Windows, what are they buying?" he said in an interview on Monday.Yet there's no doubt that Microsoft would move to merge its tools and assets with Yahoo's, according to Greg DeMichillie, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft and a contributor to the initial design of the .NET Framework. "Anything Microsoft does, they think about it from a platform perspective," he said.The final shape of that platform is far from clear as there are substantial redundancies between the companies' services offerings. (Purely on the development front, Yahoo and Microsoft are competing within the mashup market with their Pipes and Popfly toolsets, respectively.)For developers already wedded to the Microsoft platform, the major pitfall is the "corporate indigestion" that could follow a deal, according to DeMichillie."The biggest risk to developers is that it defocuses executives from the important job of getting a Vista successor out," he said.A Microsoft spokesperson said Monday that the company would not comment beyond materials on its Web site announcing the proposed deal.
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Software giant goes public with $44.6 billion bid for the Net pioneer. Will Yahoo succumb to the advances or rebuff Microsoft as it has before?