Why Microsoft Is Chasing Yahoo 245
latif writes "Microsoft has been chasing Yahoo for quite a while now. Most people think that it all started with Microsoft's acquisition bid for Yahoo, but this is not so. It is well-known that Microsoft and Yahoo have been negotiating since at least May of 2006, and may have been negotiating since 2003. I have done a thorough analysis utilizing information made public over the past five years and my analysis suggests that most people are completely wrong about what Microsoft wants from Yahoo."
Re:Jealousy (Score:5, Insightful)
ARE there software companies that people actually like?! Google used to be up there, but they keep poking at the "do no evil" mantra. Every other software company I can think of has a core group of users that like the product, but those same folks also seem pretty ambivalent about the company.
It seems that the hardware companies get the love because you can touch the shiny. Examples: Tivo, Apple, Harley Davidson, Crispy Creme...
Sheldon
Pretending they have a chance. (Score:4, Insightful)
They have to show revenue growth but it is impossible. What do they have without their monopoly? A lot of third rate code that no one wants. Between Vista and Open Office, they are showing revenue problems. Buying Yahoo makes it look like they can extend their monopoly to the web but it's Hotamail all over again. They are proving that they can spend even more money to be an also ran. At best they can crush and rob Yahoo, but that won't do anything to Google or anyone else who wants to run services with free software. The harder M$ tries, the more obvious it is that their game is over.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Perfect Strangers ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow. Yahoo definitely does not have stale search offerings or second-rate search technology.
Just because you're not the flavor-of-the-month search engine doesn't mean your technology is stale or second rate.
The only thing I can agree with is the unmotivated workforce--but they are in no way a mediocre bunch.
YHOO survived the dot-com bust because they are a well-diversified and complete web service company.
GOOG is striving to become that, but GOOG is flavor-of-the month because GOOG is the glamorous company that avoided the dot-com bust because they started later.
Come on, try to be objective when comparing YHOO and GOOG.
Good press does not necessarily mean better company.
Bad press does not necessarily mean worse company.
It's a shame so many of you feel this way without any sort of objective research.
.
Holy run-on article (Score:4, Insightful)
We have never needed a good summary as much as this time!
Re:Perfect Strangers ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because you're not the flavor-of-the-month search engine doesn't mean your technology is stale or second rate.
Except that Google's become synonymous with search and has pretty much owned search for the last half decade -- and Yahoo has made no appreciable gains. I would say by definition Yahoo is at least second-rate. I don't think you can call a market leader for years running, with a brand ubiquity like they've got, a "flavor of the month".
When was the last time you heard someone tell someone to "just Yahoo that" or "I AltaVista'd so-and-so"?
I work with several ex-Yahoos, they're all wonderful and bright people... but Yahoo needs to adopt the Avis mentality and try harder. They're behind in search, Musicmatch->Y! Music didn't pan out, and they've got a whole raft of other unneeded sites/services. (omg.yahoo.com anyone ? )
Living in denial about your competitive ecosystem is the surest ticket to irrelevance and extinction.
Re:Perfect Strangers ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, they're so flavour of the month, I've only been using them since before the turn of the century.</sarcasm>
Note to all the clueless idiots out there: Google got popular quick because they had a search page that would load in under a minute back when most of us were still on dial-up. Having search rankings that worked as well as anybody else's was just icing on the cake. The hardcore techies might have gone nuts over their algorithms, but the rest of us were just happy to get our search results quickly and not wait for ages for a bunch of cruft and advertising to load first.
Re:Pretending they have a chance. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup. Over indeed it is, as their crashing stock and sales shows......
Wait a minute....
Is it or isn't it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Contradictory statements. If it's well-known that they've been negotiating since 2006, then (by definition) most people would know that.
Re:Perfect Strangers ? (Score:5, Insightful)
GOOG is striving to become that, but GOOG is flavor-of-the month because GOOG is the glamorous company that avoided the dot-com bust because they started later.
How long does a company have to remain flavor-of-the-month before they get upgraded to preferred-flavor?
And how many Dot Com Failures had Google's billions of dollars *cash* in the bank (as opposed to hemorrhaging venture capital) before they imploded?
Re:brain and brain... what is brain? (Score:4, Insightful)
Legtimacy (Score:4, Insightful)
Even with billions of dollars in the bank, 90% of the browsing population using IE, which forces people to MSN, MSN still has less than 1/2 the market of Yahoo, and not even twice the market share of AOL. This tends to indicate that MS has no clue how to direct users to content, but that they don't even know how to learn how to do such a thing. Basically, because MS cannot force MS Windows users to search with MSN, beyond what already exists in IE, and MS cannot undercut the prices of the product, as it did with XBox, MS is not succeeding in the search market. Those are it's two primary tools for success, and neither is suitable here.
The only option is go after Yahoo. There are two benefits to this, only one seems to be covered in the link. By far the most important is that the combined Yahoo/MS market share will be 35% This should help market ads. The downside risk is how many people will stop using Yahoo because of MS ownership, and the changes that the clearly incompetent MS staff(remember MSN only has 10%, that is for a reason) make to the service. This gives MS legitimacy in the marketplace.
The second, as implied by the link is that MS may be able to make trouble for google. This will result in what MS does best, funneling money from productive interests to fuel it's unproductive coffers, but will not likely affect Googles market share.
Here is why. Google is still innovating customer service. There are free apps on the web to do all sorts of stuff. They know their core business, bringing eyeballs to ads, and do what it takes to keep those eyeballs happy. Google is free to do whatever it takes. MS is not free to do whatever it takes. For instance, why is MS charging a subscription fee for MS Office. Why aren't they putting a Web version on MSN. Tell me how many people would create an MSN account and use it as their portal if they got to use even a limited version of MS word for free in the deal.
Why indeed. There are only two possible reasons. First, MS does not have the technology to do what Google is already doing. Second, the MS Office franchise, stale as it is, is still too valuable for MS to use to drive what is clear to become the future profit center for any large software concern. Again, MS looks back, everyone else looks forward. This is not bad, MS makes a lot of money on it, but it why MS can and does overpay for new tech(re: facebook), and why Yahoo is a deal that has to be done, even it eventually fails and means the end of Yahoo, and 80% market share for google.
Re:MS-YHOO would never work. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's called a "brand name". Microsoft, since its first foray on to the Internet with MSN in 1995-96 has never been able to produce a popular online presence. Guys like Lycos, Altavista and Yahoo were already filling the search market, and Microsoft was unable to puncture their dominance. Google, of course, pretty much kicked the shit out of Yahoo, which now holds a very distant second place, and yet, Microsoft still isn't on the map. I think Microsoft (correctly) has come to the conclusion that it matters not at all what they do, people don't care about msn.com or live.com. They go into Tools-->Options when they get their brand new Windows computer and change it to google.com. Even having a search box that defaults to Microsoft's search has failed, as basically threats that the EU is going to go medieval on their ass have pretty much forced them to open it up more easily to competitors (read: Google).
With more and more apps set to be delivered via the Web, this is about getting a platform that they have a hope in hell of someone actually using. I still think it will fail. Yahoo is, as I said, a very distant second place. Google is indeed the new Microsoft, and as with Microsoft's competitors in the past, Microsoft is finding itself being very effectively locked out of a very important market.
I'm not at all comfortable with yet-another-computer-monopoly, and I don't buy at all into Google's "do no evil" mantra, since, so far, they've done plenty. But there's a great deal of irony. It couldn't have happened to a nicer company.
Re:In other words (Score:2, Insightful)
Things are always obvious in hindsight.
Re:Pretending they have a chance. (Score:1, Insightful)
I wish I could mod this post "-1: Wishful Thinking."
Amen to that, brother.
.NET could never be used for an enterprise application, their parents/grandparents have all ditched Windows for Linux, and Ron Paul is currently statistically favored to win the Presidency of the United States.
Slashdot is an odd place. While there are a lot of posters here whose contributions I greatly enjoy, it's chock-full of bullshit liars who live in an anti-Microsoft fantasy land. If I had a nickel for every "I work for a Fortune 500 and we're ditching Microsoft/Adobe/IBM/CorporateSoftwareWhippingboy" anecdote I've read here, I could retire and live off the interest. In their made up little world,
Thankfully, these people probably don't wield much influence outside of the online world (or really in it, if we're going to be honest about it.) I do wish they'd migrate over to digg, where their "Microsoft infidels are committing mass-suicide in the streets" FUD would be more at home, but still.
Re:Perfect Strangers ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Note to all the clueless idiots out there: Google got popular quick because they had a search page that would load in under a minute back when most of us were still on dial-up. Having search rankings that worked as well as anybody else's was just icing on the cake. The hardcore techies might have gone nuts over their algorithms, but the rest of us were just happy to get our search results quickly and not wait for ages for a bunch of cruft and advertising to load first.
I'd add another thing to that. This is my experience, your mileage may have varied etc etc.
Way back before then - circa 1997 - AltaVista was king of search. However, around 1999 or so the results from AltaVista started to go down the tubes - most of the hits were either spam or totally irrelevant.
Out of practically nowhere comes Google - with results which were actually useful and little or no spam. Doesn't take a superbrain to decide to stick to using Google. But the Internet is a fickle place, and it's a lot easier to visit an alternate website than it is to take your bricks & mortar business elsewhere. (For one thing, "there's only one shop in this town that sells N" is not a valid argument). The mighty can fall, and I don't doubt it will happen again.
Not news, just more speculation (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Perfect Strangers ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Google has been around for quite a few years. I don't see it as a fad. Just like back in 1994 when people said Linux is just a fad.
With software you may be first rate but if you don't innovate fast enough it becomes second rate.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:MS-YHOO would never work. (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. With business being business, I am considering shorting their stock since I have not seen any new value being created. And customers buy value.
Windows 95 was value.
Windows 2000 was value.
Office 95/97 was value.
DirectX was value.
Visual Studio 98 was value.
XP was not value. (It was nothing substantial over w2k) .Net/Silverlight was not value. (Attempt to re-lockin developers, with POSIX un-compliance, whole new libs). C# is no value because it is 1/2way between C++ and Python (or Ruby). .Net)
Windows Vista was not value. (Negative value)
IE was not value.
Office 2003/2007 was not value.
Visual Studio after 2008 was not of value (a side effect of
All Microsoft services are not of value.
Virtualization is not of value (VMware leads)
So up until about 2001 MS was providing value. Since then it's all been maintenance or catch-up. But during this period, competitors advanced. What MS had provided as value was commoditized. (Linux, OpenOffice) Or people started doing it better (Apple). MS does not have a value proposition anymore.
As you indicate, they are floating on cash. If MS can't re-invent themselves, things rest on the bottom when there is no water left. Its like a ballistic trajectory, and without another rocket stage, it's going to come down. But MS does not operate in a vacuum. Ubuntu and OSX are my main reasons for supporting the short position. The EEE PC is nice anecdotal evidence of Linux providing sufficient value. I also like Qt as a good platform for Win/Lin/OS development.
Further backing the short position is that there is no one or set of technologies that needs to be delivered. In 95-2000, we needed a stable kernel and apps, we needed networking. We got those. In 2001 we needed a safe, stable browser. We got that (in 2007 with FF2).
I buy stock in what I use. This is good for me in the tech sector because I am ahead of the curve. I use FF, Apple, Yahoo, Google, Adobe, Verizon (FIOS). I keep watching Ubuntu. I'm not pining for anything Microsoft has in the pipeline. I am pining for FF and Apple, and Adobe (AIR, though I'd rather a W3C platform).
I'd get behind MS again if they ever brought value back, but they are just focusing on taking it away from others (.Net, SilverLight, Search). That is a sign to me that they don't know what to do next either.
Re:MS-YHOO would never work. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes. "Locking out" is implying that Google is doing something to prevent MS from competing. MS has every opportunity to beat Google. Even with MS leveraging their OS and browser as much as they can, Google is still handily beating them. Even with MS buying every little new search technology they can get, Google is still beating them.
In the future, everyone might not be as loyal to Google as they are now, but Google understands that their business is service. Services traditionally have had no lock-in. If someone can perform the service better/cheaper, they'll get more business. If they can't come up with better services than the next guy, they're toast. MS still thinks that they are selling products. Their products have a lock-in and they can be mediocre or horrible (ME), but their customers are stuck with them. MS has to be more than mediocre. They're not used to that.
Re:Perfect Strangers ? (Score:3, Insightful)
GMAIL: Ajax, magic.
YMAIL: Flash dog shit.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Pretending they have a chance. (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't possibly have missed all of that bad press, so pretending it doesn't exist is what makes you sound like a completely fraudulent shill. If you want to sound honest, acknowledge the widespread bad press and try to address it.
Or continue as you have been, and expect to have zero credibility with 100% of the readers -- why even bother?