Google-Postini deal: More than meets the eye
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Blog: The e-mail marriage makes sense:Postini adds vertical integration for Google's outsourced Gmail business.
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By Tommy Tomlinson, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.  Feb. 11--Google is being modest.   For proof, just Google the phrase "unbelievably one-sided deal." You'll get links to the Kyoto environmental accords and a few terrible basketball trades.
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Microsoft has the software. Yahoo! has the ad revenue. Together they can challenge Google. Among the likely winners: online advertisers.
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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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Google, il motore di ricerca piÃ¹ famoso del mondo, neo-quotato a Wall Street, dopo il lancio di Gmail, l&#39;innovativo servizio di posta elettronica, si appresta a lanciare Gbrowser, il browser marchiato Google.
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The decision by Google to purchase the messaging security firm Postini for $625 million suggests an acknowledgment by the Mountain View-based Web giant that, before it can fully compete with Microsoft in the office suite market, it needs to beef up its security technology.
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Google Inc. has agreed to buy messaging security company Postini Inc. for US$625 million in a move to increase the appeal of Google's hosted applications among big businesses, the companies announced on Monday.
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Internet search giant Google said Monday it agreed to buy Web security firm Postini for 625 million dollars in cash, expanding its business software applications.
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The latest company to join Google is  on-demand communications security and compliance solutions Postini. The deal was sealed today with Google purchasing Postini for a hefty sum of $625 million according to a Google official press release.  Postini is currently serving 35,000 business and 10 million users worldwide. None other than Google&#8217;s CEO, [...]
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I've submitted my bid to buy shares of Google Inc. in the computer search company's giant auction-style initial public offering. That could turn out to be the good news or the bad news.
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Google may have plans to expand its search engine beyond static text.
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Google Inc.  said on Monday it has agreed to buy Web-based security provider Postini for $625 million, expanding its package of online applications to compete with Microsoft Corp.'s  Office.
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Contrary to some published views, the Dutch auction process of Google&#39;s initial public offering (IPO) last week was a success for the internet search engine and its investors despite being undertaken in a &quot;horrendous&quot; market, a legal commentator has
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Esce la prima beta di *Google Print* e tenta di imporsi nel mercato della vendita on-line di libri. Infatti entra in un mercato per il momento monopolizzato da Amazon e Barnes &amp; Noble. Lo stile di Google rimane
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Google steps up its challenge to Microsoft's Office system with the $625m purchase of email security firm Postini.
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NEW YORK, 22 SET - L&#39;ipotesi della creazione da parte di Google di un browser per la connessione alla rete Internet minaccia il dominio di Microsoft. Assediata da Linux nei programmi open source e costretta
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Google Inc.'s public stock offering is a reminder of the perils and promise of the high-tech IPO market.