Falling Microsoft Income Endangers Yahoo Bid 195
Dionysius, God of Wine and Leaf, points out a new wrinkle to Microsoft's pursuit of Yahoo. The most recent quarterly results, which saw Microsoft's earnings drop by 6% from the previous year (revenue from Windows alone was down 24%), have caused the stock to dip. This has reduced the value of the cash-and-stock offer from its original $44B to something nearer $40B. Yahoo, of course, has maintained all along that the original offer was lowball. A business professor is quoted: "Whatever leverage [Microsoft] built up in the last few days could be slipping away."
wrong wrong wrong* (Score:5, Insightful)
Venture capitalists poured billions into the industry without considering that the market had yet to produce the great new age of commerce that was promised.
Startups without a coherent product were valued as multiple million dollar companies, and attracted investment like dead dogs attract flies.
And all this at a time when I believe broadband wasn't even widely deployed.
It was a bust waiting to happen. It's just a shame that so many viable companies were taken down in the crash.
The Offer is NOT LOWBALL (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at the earnings growth of Yahoo for the past five years. IT IS pitiful. Yahoo is being too arrogant for its own good.
Personally, I think Microsoft should just walk away. Watch that Yahoo stock drop faster than gravity.
Re:Downward spiral? (Score:4, Insightful)
If we had a truly open single platform, progress and innovation would have been a lot faster.
It was always inevitable that a more open platform would take over from the myriad of incompatible systems that were available years ago, unfortunately it was only the hardware that was open, or at least competitive, while software became more locked in than ever.
Microsoft have stifled the evolution of the open IBM compatible platform, not helped it. They stalled the transition to 32bit, and are doing the same with the transition to 64. They delayed other valuable technologies like USB and SATA by being way behind everyone else in supporting them. And they are keeping people stuck on the crufty legacy bios, because of their unwillingness to support EFI, or anything else that would be newer and better. How many other good technologies have been delayed or killed completely, simply because microsoft couldnt be bothered to support them, or supported them in such a half assed way as to make people falsely perceive them as useless.
They (along with other closed source vendors) are also stopping people moving to other superior architectures (some of which are more open than x86, but less widely supported because they wont run windows).
Re:dumb, ill-informed sarcasm (Score:2, Insightful)
The reason they want the cap lifted is becuase the people being brought in from abroad are cheap pure and simple!
BY the way I'm live in the UK and so therefore have no agenda.
This rubbish about it stopping PHD's etc is crap. By the way if they are being bought in to fill postitons in the US, why do they need to create start ups??
Its a ruse,the high tech companies do not want to pay a decent living wage to americans, when they can hire and fire foreginers, who will also be less uppetity knowing that their green card depends upon them being employed with that company!
Re:Clearly caused by H-1b limits (Score:5, Insightful)
I was going to make a joke about this but actually its not funny.
Re:Its a beautiful day after all! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Downward spiral? (Score:2, Insightful)
Thats the worst load of crap ever uttered in this industry. Most things on the hardware side has been hold back because of Microsofts unwillingness to support new technologies.
If you take your time and compare what was on the market when Microsoft started dominating the x86 platform you will find that first Dos then Windows was long behind the competition. They have always been lagging behind the competition, since day one.
Their saviour was that IBM released their platform into the open because of their problems with the DOJ (ironic isnt it?). They got a hold of a platform that took off like a rocket because of it being open and managed to lock down the software side of it. Had IBM held onto x86 Microsoft as we know it would still be making stoplight-software.
I think our software snails along and its development is painfully slow if you look at what happens in labs around the world. Microsoft is just now implementing things in Windows that has been standard in Unix since late 60's. If you think thats fast meet my lawn, enjoy watching it grow!
Re:Clearly caused by H-1b limits (Score:3, Insightful)
ummmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:ummmm (Score:4, Insightful)
this might shock you so hold on to your strawberry daiquiri, it takes years to get enough experience to even start training at the level MS needs to hire people to stay competitive.
Re:Windows revenue dropped 24% ??!?!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft could afford to misspend the money it took to develop Vista. But Microsoft cannot afford to allow Windows share in the installed base to erode 10 points from the current level. Apple has already taken advantage of that opening, and Linux, mainly Ubuntu, is growing even faster, though from a such a tiny base that the statistics are iffy.
How bad would a 10% decline be? It would leave Microsoft with 80% of all personal computers that access Web sites. That doesn't seem irreversible. But it is worse than it looks for two reasons:
1. That 10% contains a large number of opinion leaders.
2. The momentum would be hard to reverse.
If a 10% decline happens in the next 18 months, before Microsoft has a response, then Microsoft will be in serious trouble.
3 years is far too long for Microsoft not to have a response. Well within 3 years we will know if we have a long-term competitive environment for personal computer OSs, possibly with new entrants other than Mac OS X and Linux.
Re:Its a beautiful day after all! (Score:2, Insightful)