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Shareholders may bring Microsoft and Yahoo together

Started by Bill Sodeman · 6 months ago

Journalists are starting to discuss what financial analysts realized earlier this month: 90 percent institutional owners of Yahoo stock are also Microsoft shareholders. See this CNET article for details.
Fund managers don’t like to bid against themselves
This plac ... Continue reading »

6 comments

  • billso

    1 year ago

    From Business Week comes this article, which adds more weight to my final prediction. Microsoft might find a hostile takeover fight is cheaper than a higher bid for Yahoo.
    reply
  • atypicalliving

    1 year ago

    Also, word is that in the News Corp. deal that Yahoo will be folded into the MySpace franchise.

    If there's anything that I need to avoid, it's the prospect of "mY!space."

    The logical collaboration would be AOL/Yahoo, because the combined web presence of both could rival the ubiquitous G. I do have to say though, unless they come up with a SaaS web program as savvy as the gMail/google docs/gCal EVERYONE is dead in the water.
    reply
  • billso

    1 year ago

    Yahoo gets folded into MySpace? That makes even less sense than anything I've read about the Microsoft-Yahoo debacle.

    Still, it could happen. MySpace hasn't been the advertising giant that News Corp envisioned. If Yahoo knows anything, it's advertising.

    Here's an article from today's Guardian. Rupert Murdoch has little to lose by courting Yahoo.

    Last June, there were reports that News Corp wanted to give MySpace to Yahoo, in return for a 30% stake in Yahoo.
    reply
  • billso

    1 year ago

    By the way, SaaS is "software as a service". Webmail, online word processors, ERP packages...
    reply
  • billso

    1 year ago

    From The Register, here's an article about SaaS marketing. Sure, it's a web-based application, but that doesn't mean its good, cheap or reliable.
    reply
  • billso

    1 year ago

    John Markoff is spot on with his comments in yesterday's New York Times. Integrating Yahoo into Microsoft's operations is a difficult challenge.

    Markoff cites one of my favorite examples: Microsoft's 1997 purchase of Hotmail. It took 3.5 years to convert Hotmail servers from UNIX to Windows!

    Microsoft has little choice but to "eat its own dog food". Industry insiders expect Microsoft to use its own web sites to demonstrate the scalability, reliability and features of Windows server software.

    Yahoo uses FreeBSD, a version of UNIX, as its primary server OS, along with Java and PHP as programming languages.

    It would take an enormous effort by Microsoft to port Yahoo to a Windows infrastructure. I agree with Markoff: Yahoo's developers and programmers might cooperate if Jerry Yang blessed Microsoft's takeover.

    If it's a hostile takeover, forget it. Yahoo will bleed OSS and UNIX talent. Those employees will leave Yahoo before they cooperate with the "enemy": Microsoft.
    reply

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