Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo Takeover Offer 336
mksmac writes "According to the KOMO TV Website, Microsoft has withdrawn its bid for Yahoo after presenting them with an increased offer that was subsequently declined by Yahoo. Frankly, this seems like a smarter decision on Microsoft's part, but I'd like to hear how other people feel about the deal. Should Microsoft have walked away, pressured Yahoo via a hostile takeover or sweetened the pot until Yahoo gave in?" For those who prefer it, the NYT also has coverage, and the story is also at news.com, among many others. I like the Beeb's version as well. And for the Microsoft-centric explanation of why the courtship is over, see Steve Balmer's letter to Jerry Yang.
My question is... (Score:5, Interesting)
This doesn't seem to have been a particularly well-handled, or deeply-sincere, attempt by Microsoft... so what were they really doing?
This is a sincere question; I've seen a lot of acquisitions (and even hostile takeovers) happen, and this seemed lacking in many ways. Maybe I've missed some of the machinations; maybe not.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! (Score:5, Interesting)
Ballmer creates AOL Redux.
Re:I'm torn (Score:5, Interesting)
And, unlike a lot of the folks there, I'm fairly confident that I'd be able to find a new job the second it became official.
It's one of those dangerous ideas that you really need to be a nerd and know microsofties, googlers, and yahoos in order to understand exactly how stupid of an idea it really is.
Credibility lost? (Score:3, Interesting)
This doesn't seem to have been a particularly well-handled, or deeply-sincere, attempt by Microsoft... so what were they really doing?
I'm happy because it means more competition, but I admit I'm also somewhat confused as you are about what they are really doing...
Maybe it really is about some high-level finance strategy that only people in the know can grasp?
Savvy move (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:My question is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:MS, you lucked out (Score:4, Interesting)
This is kinda a silly mindset as you seem to think the limiting factor in all of the above is money. I highly doubt on any project within Microsoft, the limiting factor is ever budgetary. Throwing more money at something that is already sufficently funded has *ZERO* positive results and infact can cause a negative.
Frankly that is part of why MS was making such boneheaded deals... they have too much money and too much of a lock on their own markets. They need to expand into new areas, or die. This is why they are willing to lose 10 billion dollars on the Xbox and are willing to pay 32 billion for a washed out internet company. Well that, and Balmer is a fucking idiot.
Re:MS, you lucked out (Score:1, Interesting)
The time when Microsoft's primary concern was making money is long since past. These days they want control. Lots of it. What they worry about is not a few pesky billion dollars, what they worry about is alternatives to their operating system destroying their ALL their profits. They are worried because Google supports Firefox, Google supports Linux. Google supports ODF, Google competes with Microsoft's e-mail services. What is worse, is that it isn't just google. It is Sun, IBM, Redhat, ASUS , Dell , Intel, AMD
Therefore Microsoft will fight Google, they will fight Sun, they will fight IBM. They have to cooperate with Intel and AMD , but deep down they are sort of fighting them too. If they could run yahoo at a loss for 20 years merely to prevent google from taking over the web, they would do so, because they know Google has the potential to fuck up their office monopoly. They don't know how to fight Google tho, and thus they try every desperate attempt they can think of.
Re:My question is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Credibility lost? (Score:2, Interesting)
If they acquired Yahoo!, fine, if not, fine.
Re:Cant say I didnt expect this. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:My question is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yahoo combined with MS's own Web and internet services would have been enough to give MS majority market share in several new markets. More importantly, many of yahoo's services are pretty decent and doing quite well. For some other company they might not be a good acquisition, but for a company like MS that has several monopolies and is not at all shy about illegally leveraging them, Yahoo makes a lot of sense. When you have 25% market share, breaking compatibility with everyone else hurts you more than them. When you have 52% and it is growing because it is tied to Windows and MS Office and IE, breaking compatability with everyone else hurts them more.
It sounds unlikely to me. If that was their plan, it probably backfired. All it seems to have done is to get Google and Yahoo talking and making technology partnerships.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I'm torn (Score:4, Interesting)
Zimbra has effectively painted itself into a corner when it comes to value in terms of cost/benefit. They helped themselves to FOSS underpinnings in order to develop their product quickly, and because of this they are obligated to offer a feature-crippled free version. Because of their well-funded PR department they were able to spin this as "see, we're an open source company" in order to gain some street cred, but anyone who has taken a serious look at Zimbra knows that if you want it to be useful to anything more than the most simplistic of installations, you have to buy the "Network Edition."
This effectively locks them out of the marketplace for true open source solutions such as Citadel [citadel.org] and Kolab [kolab.org] and eGroupware [egroupware.org] because they're not true end-to-end FOSS. At the same time, they can't raise their prices high enough to make real money with the product, because customers would just as soon go with Exchange.
Disclaimer: I'm a Citadel developer, and a proponent of end-to-end FOSS solutions rather than weird commercial hybrids such as Zimbra (or Scalix, for that matter). But I think there's a lot of weight to what I'm saying here.
Re:My question is... (Score:5, Interesting)
The other 90% of the time, run something that doesn't draw vacuum.
Of course, in a greener world, we're printing less, but let's face it: quality printing (booklets and stuff) is not exactly a strong suit of Free Software. Which is kind of ironic, as text handling was one of the strong suits of the early Unix [wikipedia.org].
Re:My question is... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'm torn (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Both down (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:My question is... (Score:3, Interesting)
If we could get into Yahoo stats, I bet there is a huge explosion of user accounts at Yahoo mail back in 1998, when Hotmail got acquired.
If you buy Yahoo as Microsoft, you don't automatically have 250 million active users (just mail!), you may have 130 million since the rest would purge their accounts and move to other services like Google. It is just 3-4 clicks to purge one Yahoo account, of course I checked if it is easy/possible right after "Microhoo" mentioned. Even the least technical users I know personally asked me to find another commercial webmail provider in case "Microsoft" buys Yahoo.
Yahoo is a open source, FreeBSD/PHP powered services giant. I am using their mail since 1998 and never got rejected to login because of OS I use, the services being down or anything. That is why they can SELL "Yahoo mail plus" to end users. People trust to their services while they provide no guarantee.
Yahoo and Google partnership can happen and it would have no effect to the users, Microsoft/Yahoo partnership would have huge effects since every user NOT using MS Windows/IE (add Silverlight soon) is still considered a loss at Microsoft HQ.
Re:My question is... (Score:5, Interesting)
No doubt there's also a LOT of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" going on at the strategic level.
Since Google isn't profiting directly off Android, I don't think there's much direct competition between the companies in the mobile space. Google wants traffic to their servers, and is setting up Android as a free way for companies to build more network-enabled software even on the cheapest phones (a 'rising tide lifts all boats' effort towards the mobile space). Ultimately it doesn't much matter to Google if traffic to their servers is coming from an Android device or an iPhone device, so long as the traffic isn't going to MSYahoo. As long as Google stays out of the phone hardware business, I suspect Apple won't see them as a direct competitor, they'll just be another generic software platform provider while Apple provides an integrated hardware/software solution.
Re:Cant say I didnt expect this. (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft's attempt to takeover Yahoo was a demonstration of MSFT's inability to even grasp the new paradigm of the internet, even today. MSFT has all of the tools they need to win in the market, but cannot wrap their heads around such concepts as "openness" and "sharing". They can no longer take their ball and go home, and will continue to suffer.
Re:No future. (Score:3, Interesting)
Could you possibly make that praise any fainter? FreeBSD is still the preferred choice of many server admins for a lot of reasons, including the fact that the newly-released 7-STABLE series is ludicrously fast. For example, when researching PostgreSQL performance tuning, a fairly common recommendation is to run it on FreeBSD.
It's not exactly the limping dinosaur some people around here seem to imagine.
Re:My question is... (Score:4, Interesting)
What the board and many here don't seem to understand is that Yahoo's stock is greatly overvalued even in the low 20s...it had a negative/flat growth rate with a forward looking price to earnings well above ~50...Google, which as a HUGE growth rate only has a forward looking price to earnings of ~32. Yahoo could sign a deal with Google and increase profits slightly, but they would have just wasted billions on their new advertising platform "Amazon", and their stock would still be overvalued. The fact that Yahoo didn't take that bid shows how poorly managed the company is. There are going to be a lot of shareholder lawsuits tomorrow morning as the stock drops 20-30%. At this point I wouldn't be surprised to see Microsoft just stepping in to buy shares and build a position to 5% stake, which is the legal limit before you have to file with the SEC and publicly disclose that you massive stake. At that point they would probably do a proxy battle and would win...getting Yahoo at an even cheaper price. Yahoo's management really is horrible, Ballmer (like him or not) is making a brilliant move. He tried to be generous with a massive premium, now he's just going to give them the traditional Microsoft shaft.