MS to buy YAHOO!

[Yaka]

the beeb are reporting MS are looking to buy out Yahoo! in a massive £22bn deal:eek2:
, thats alot of wolla

 

[DaGaffer]

Not the first time MS have tried to buy them. Good premium on the Yahoo! share price though (62%). Wonder if MS would bin MSN if they did the deal?

 

[Rubric]

Not the first time MS have tried to buy them. Good premium on the Yahoo! share price though (62%). Wonder if MS would bin MSN if they did the deal?

Nah they would bin yahoo messenger.

 

[Shovel]

MSN is more than just an IM client, Rubric. It's the entire portal and information services.

As a techie Yahoo, I'm not sure what to make of it (other than not being keen). In terms of technology platforms, Y! and MS are on opposite sides of the park. Y! uses a lot of Open Source software (Rasmus Lerdorf, the PHP creator works here, plus the YUI JavaScript framework, R3 content management system and so on are OSS too), whereas Microsoft (obviously) build on their own closed .NET systems. Basically, there's no real chance of ‘merging’ products. With the companies combined, there's two search engines, two maps sites, two portals, two web programming frameworks…*huge duplication. Pretty bleak if it were to happen, but my feeling is that whilst they'll go through the process of considering it, the companies are quite incompatible.

 

[Chilly]

sack, sell, close down. easily worth $50bn to ms. they might get owned by the competition people tho

 

[Litmus]

Cant see how buying Yahoo will be a good move, unless they revamp everthing about it i cant see it over takeing google anytime soon... And its gonna like like 50years until it starts paying for it self?(to cover the $22billion)

 

[DaGaffer]

MSN is more than just an IM client, Rubric. It's the entire portal and information services.

As a techie Yahoo, I'm not sure what to make of it (other than not being keen). In terms of technology platforms, Y! and MS are on opposite sides of the park. Y! uses a lot of Open Source software (Rasmus Lerdorf, the PHP creator works here, plus the YUI JavaScript framework, R3 content management system and so on are OSS too), whereas Microsoft (obviously) build on their own closed .NET systems. Basically, there's no real chance of ‘merging’ products. With the companies combined, there's two search engines, two maps sites, two portals, two web programming frameworks…*huge duplication. Pretty bleak if it were to happen, but my feeling is that whilst they'll go through the process of considering it, the companies are quite incompatible.

MS want Yahoo! for the brand and the eyeballs; combined, MSN and Yahoo aren't that far off Google globally. Thinking about it I'd guess MS would keep both brands with platform rationalisation underneath (bad news for Yahoo techies). They'd probably start with rationalised ad platforms, then IM, then search, which would be the most difficult. Of course the EU won't be keen, and a lot of Yahoo local partnerships (like BT) would be threatened. Plus, I'm guessing a lot of that ad revenue would get rationalised as well.

 

[rynnor]

The deal makes no sense to me and the price even less - its 5 years too late to make much impact on Google especially as Yahoo is a fading light with profit warnings for the last 4 quarters...

 

[Shovel]

Thing about Yahoo is that there's an identity crisis. Under Terry Semel, who is commonly accepted as being an utter, utter dick, they tried to stop being a technology company and be a media company instead, with being an advertising company alongside it. That, obviously, was a lead balloon and left Yahoo where it is now. With Jerry Yang in charge and showing a lot of passion about technology again, it remains to be seen which parts of the business he shuts down next month and which direction he actually wants to take the company.

That in itself makes the Microsoft offer harder to unravel. No-one really knows what Yahoo is right now, and it's in the middle of (attempting to) resolving that problem with no clear outcome. So what does Microsoft want to buy, and is that the same thing Yahoo has been trying to consolidate itself as?

Fuck knows…

 

[Ctuchik]

saw on the news today that theres a fairly big possibility that Yahoo will say no, or rather start to work with Google to keep Microsoft from buying them. aparently they think Microsoft is "undervaluating" (not sure of the english word for it) yahoo so they dont want to sell to them..

 

[GReaper]

Is this really the best thing for Microsoft? Yahoo are hardly having a great time themselves and are wanting to get rid of 1,000 employees to try and cut costs. I'm not a particular fan of Yahoo's products, although they seem a respectable company.

I'm not sure if this is a great idea for MS in the long term. Google has earned their position with good products, good reputation and giving what the user wants.

New competitors will appear over time to take market share in other areas. Just look at Facebook, only been around 4 years and it's a top 10 site. Is Microsoft just going to go around buying competitors when they appear because they can't come up with decent products themselves?

Sounds like a rather expensive way to do business!

 

[Ctuchik]

well, looking at EA it seems to be working probably where Microsoft is looking at to hehe

 

[dysfunction]

There must be something there that MS wants else they would not do it!
Perhaps they will fix "All Seeing Eye" once and for all...

 

[MYstIC G]

Nah they would bin yahoo messenger.

I would imagine we'd end up with a unified "Messenger" application.