Marco Boerries, EVP Yahoo!
I just sat in on a Yahoo! press conference here at CTIA and learned a little more about the company’s plans to integrate its “oneSearch 2.0″ features into mobile phones. The three key elements that Yahoo! is emphasizing are an open development platform, easier ways to search, including voice queries, and idle screen search integration.
Sounds like a thrill-ride, yes? Buckle up and let’s get things underway.
Aren’t we supposed to take a hands-off approach to the market? Like, whatever happens, happens? That’s what I thought.
ReadWriteWeb today has a counter argument to Chris Anderson’s everything will be free thesis, only it’s among the weakest counter arguments I’ve ever read. The gist—free does not equal good. Good can mean a quality product, something in the best interest of the consumer/business or whatever feels right. Par example, Gmail, being free and having unlimited storage from the get-go, put Yahoo! into a weird position. Now, instead of being able to have a Web mail model where Yahoo! can give away a 10MB account (or whatever) and charge $50 (or whatever) for more space, it has to give away mail for free, lest it go out of business.
Yes, that’s usually what happens. If it can’t compete, it goes out of business. Why that’s so horrible, I don’t know. RRW says that Google was able to abuse its position—you know, its non-existence in Web mail—to launch Gmail for free, thereby screwing Yahoo!. I don’t see why you’d want to punish Google for having the wealth to give away a product, but RRW thinks differently.
The rest of their arguments are just as head-scratching (except maybe that free does not alway equal a high-quality product. See Comcast’s excuse for a DVR remote). I suggest you read Anderson’s piece first, then RRW’s retort. Then RRW’s infantile arguments seem even more silly.
Beware of Freeconomics [ReadWriteWeb]
Though Yahoo! said “take a hike” to the initial offer, Microsoft is seemingly confident it will swallow up the Y!, as a recent internal email attests. MS is going the hostile takeover route, though it’s sugar coating how things are going to work out.
The email says, in part,
We look forward to a constructive dialogue with Yahoo’s board, management, shareholders, and employees on the value of this combination and its strategic and financial merits.
Aw, that doesn’t sound hostile at all. In fact, it sounds like they’re going to share a malt at the drugstore, they might even hold hands if Yahoo! gets lucky.
Microsoft email prepares workers for Yahoo takeover [Yahoo! News (irony!)]
Yahoo! is in talks with News Corp. about merging itself with MySpace and the company’s other Web outlets, including IGN and Photobucket. That’s because Yahoo! rejected Microsoft’s bid a few days ago and it’s looking less likely than before that Microsoft will raise the price of its bid. The discussions between Yahoo! and News Corp. right now would result in something just shy of a full buy-out by News Corp.
This is just my own personal observation, but MySpace isn’t nearly as relevant as it was a few years ago, right? (Supplanted by Facebook, which I also get the feeling has plateaued.) So then what better thing to do than to merge one also-ran (Yahoo!) with something on the decline (MySpace)?
News Corp joins Yahoo battle [Financial Times]
Got a moment to play with Yahoo! Go 3.0 Beta on Symbian hardware and it looks pretty nice. It has a sort of carousel interface with news, maps, and messaging and, sadly, doesn’t really filter images for taste and aesthetics, as we see here.
It works with Blackberries, most Nokias, and the UIQ Sony-Ericssons.
They were also showing off Yahoo’s oneSearch on the iPhone, which is a web page optimized for Safari and looks about the same as everything else that’s written for Safari. Strangely, the booth was stuffed way in the back of the show here along with AOL and the porn purveyors. Sad sad sad.
Ah, this sounds like when you were a kid and you did something so bad that your parents weren’t mad, they were just “really disappointed.” Looks like Microsoft is laying down a nice little guilt trip for Yahoo! in a recent press release, saying “It is unfortunate that Yahoo! has not embraced our full and fair proposal to combine our companies.” It also appears that Microsoft isn’t yet ready to walk away.
Yahoo! has said “no” to Microsoft. For now, at least.
The Yahoo! board is expected to formally reject Microsoft’s offer, with the thinking that the company is worth more than what Microsoft offered—$44.6 billion, or about $31 per share. The board feels the company is worth closer to $40 per share, or around $57.5 billion. That’s a $12 billion difference. Chump change.
Apparently Yahoo! is concerned about the company’s independence. Some on the board feel that Google would be a better company to partner up with than Microsoft. There’s fears that Microsoft will bid and bid until it gets its way—with our without the current board.
Nothing like high finance on the weekend.
Yahoo Board to Reject Microsoft Bid [Wall Street Journal]
In Internet time, the Microsoft bid for Yahoo! is not already old news, but it’s also teetering on the boring. All the more reason to squeeze out detail after detail, then, about each party’s motives and why, as chief executive put it, Google may have just declared “formal war” on Microsoft. Hooray for war metaphors.
As you know, Google doesn’t like the deal because it threatens its search business, its online application business (Google Docs and the like), its ad business, etc. If Microsoft is allowed to purchase Yahoo!, then Redmond will gain an unfair advantage in some of these areas. (Just think of the percentage of e-mail accounts are Yahoo! and Hotmail.) That’s why Google wants people, legislators and regulators chief among them, to remember what happened in the 1990s when Microsoft was the de-facto new world company: homogenization, innovation stagnation and the sky fell.
Expect this story to be more protracted than that silly XM-Sirius merger.
Microsoft Adversary Rises Instinctively at Yahoo Bid [New York Times]
Yahoo’s had no shortage of handsome suitors lately. While Google may not want to explicitly purchase Yahoo, it has offered “an alliance as an alternative to Microsoft’s bid,” according to Reuters. So Microsoft proposes marriage and Google comes along proposing a friends-with-benefits arrangement.
Not that Yahoo’s not playing the field a bit, though. Sources indicate that it believes the $31-per-share buyout price is too low and “Yahoo’s efforts to find an alternative bidder could simply be a measure to pressure Microsoft to boost its bid, which valued Yahoo at $44.6 billion when first announced on Friday.”
Speaking of the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal, Yahoo! just said that it’s gonna take its sweet time deciding whether or not to accept the unsolicited offer—”quite a bit of time,” being the exact phrasing. How independent the company would remain post-acsuisition is also a matter of contention.
Yahoo! also said it’d consider offers from other companies, like News Corp.
This story won’t be going away any time soon. Just a heads up.
Me either
Didn’t people complain when Yahoo! bought Flickr in 2005? These same folks are at it again, claiming the sale of Yahoo! to Microsoft will destroy their favorite photo sharing service. Some users are apparently at odds with Microsoft’s online ethos as it were—trying to come up with a service to mach another, already existing service. See Windows Live QnA and Yahoo! Answers. (TechCrunch predicted which Yahoo! services would be replaced by Microsoft ones.)
“Microsoft is not a customer oriented company, they’re an enterprise company,” said one terrified users.
You know what? Don’t use the service if you’re so upset. No reason to scream bloody murder because you spell Microsoft “M$.” Wait and see before you complain like a child.
Flickr Rebellion Brews at Specter of M$ Acquisition [Compiler Wired]
Like the kid in Can’t Buy Me Love, now that Microsoft has its eye on Yahoo!, everyone wants to get with the faltering ex-nerd. Good riddance, I say. Let News Corp. or Microsoft or a bunch of hedge fund guys pick up this dog at rock bottom prices and turn Yahoo into what Netscape eventually became — a pet project and then an also ran. This is a small world and mindshare, which fleeting, doesn’t often alight back on the popular sites of old. When, for example, is the last time you hit Buy.com on purpose? Didn’t think so. You’ll do a search and end up there “accidentally” but you don’t type in Buy.com to look for stuff if you don’t know where to look.
Good luck, Microsoft. That 16% Yahoo! search market share will definitely buoy MSN for a while, but not much else. Google might be a giant now, but she will fall to something else and so on and so on, ad infinitum. You can’t go home again.
Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo! for $44 billion, or $31 per share. Right now, Yahoo! trades for $19.18, so the $31 price tag (a 62 percent premium) must look very tempting to Yahoo! shareholders, especially given the company’s lackluster performance lately.
In a letter to Yahoo!’s board of directors, Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer said the two companies should become one in order to better take on Google. “Today this market is increasingly dominated by one player. Together, Microsoft and Yahoo! can offer a competitive choice while better fulfilling the needs of customers and partners.” (TechCrunch has posted the entire letter.)
Good, bad, who cares? The Negative Neds on MSNBC are already questioning the merger, kindly reminding viewers that AOL TimeWarner was a bust.
I’m sure this will be developing all day, which is good news for us because Friday is usually an awfully boring day. Not today.
Microsoft Makes Unexpected $44.6B Offer for Internet Icon Yahoo [AP/Yahoo! Finance via Drudge]
Apologies to the Register for stealing their Yahoo! headline schtick. 2008 will be the year mobile porn gets a foothold on the market, say a number of sources in the industry. Europe, always ahead in the porn game, spent almost $800 million last year on mobile phones — a number I would question if not for the iPhone’s extremely pornable form factor. And the US only spent $24 million — for shame!
The bandwidth most of us get on our non-3G phones isn’t enough for anything more than e-mail and crippled mobile web, so if the industry wants its consumers to shell out for a mobile peep show, they’ll need to up the transfer speeds. Here’s hoping.
Porn to spice up cell phones [Yahoo!]
Eliot Van Buskirk was sick — sick! — of paying for music download services. Now that Amazon is DRM-free and offers lots of music, he decided to cancel all of his music subscriptions. Yahoo was the easiest at about 1 minute but it took him 30 minutes to cancel Napster and 10 minutes to cancel Rhapsody. This reminds me of trying to cancel my XBox Live and MS SPOT subscriptions. Microsoft hides most of their cancellation systems behind languid representatives in a call center somewhere in Bangalore, ensuring anger all around.
Why (And How) I Just Canceled All My Music Subscriptions [Wired]
This isn’t exactly what we expected in terms of in-flight Wi-Fi, but beggars can’t be choosers and something is better than nothing. JetBlue, Yahoo! and RIM have announced free in-flight Wi-Fi services starting on the 11th of this month. But there’s a catch as there always is. The service is limited to Yahoo! Mail, Messenger and Wi-Fi enabled BlackBerries will have access to their BB mail and messenger. That’s sort of janky, in my opinion. BetaBlue as it’s being dubbed will roll out on an A320 at 8AM from JFK to SFO.
JetBlue to Test Inflight Email, Instant-Messaging Services [WSJ]
