Yahoo! and Microsoft

[yesthattom]

One of the under-reported parts of the story is that Microsoft still has the option of doing a hostile take-over attempt of Yahoo! They certainly have the cash on hand to do it.

Brilliantly, since the media has decided to under-report it, if Microsoft goes that route, the media will be in a wonderful position to call it “a surprise move by Microsoft.”

Comments

[crs.livejournal.com]

Well, Microsoft kinda said they weren't going to go that route. As in, Ballmer told his stockholders that he was done looking at it...

I thought that kind of thing was at least semi-binding, in a publicly-traded company.

[lonesomepolecat.livejournal.com]

They specifically said that they weren't going to do it as Yahoo has made it clear that if they tried a hostile takeover they would get a fairly gutted company.

[cpj.livejournal.com]

I've actually been seeing a lot of coverage.

Yahoo's board is pissed; Microsoft's board is pissed. They both want the parties to either walk away or just screw and get it over with. Either way, it seems they just want a firm decision.

[rainbear.livejournal.com]

But. But. Ballmer said he wouldn't. Surely he wouldn't *lie*! Would he? I mean, it's Microsoft! They, they don't lie! *snif*

</sarcasm_mod:OFF>

[etler.livejournal.com]

ObDisclaimer: I work for MSFT via recent acquisition and have nothing to do with anything important.

Can't any company do a "hostile takeover" at pretty much any time? I'm no expert on SEC regulations, so I could very well be wrong here.

In any case, if they're going to do it, at this point I'd wait for the stock price to drop back down to what it's really worth (sub-$20 IMHO) and get a nice damaged goods discount.

[kimuchi.livejournal.com]

The local press has reported the possibility of a hostile take over, at least when the initial bid was rejected. I think it was even mentioned in the one-line blurb on the front page of sfgate at one point. It hasn't been a secret.

[mollly-molly8.livejournal.com]

You totally should.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

What?

[tsimbler.livejournal.com]

Taunting commentaries that simply throw MS into the "evil" bin are so last-century.

"The media" can call it roast duck it they want to. But anyone with any basic knowledge of these companies knows MS has the cash if they want it badly enough.

I hate to be the MS apologist - but Ballmer can change his mind - or have the board or the stockholders or the marker conditions change his mind - without it rising to the level of lying. In business, conditions change, and I'd assume he means "in the current situation". It's not like he claimed he had proof that Yahoo was seeking yellow cake from Africa.

Anyone too naive to know that isn't likely to care about a merger on any rational level.

By me, the question is what the effect would be on the research itself. Research cultures tend to get inbred and convoluted, so my gut feeling is it's best to have as many different ones as you can. MS Research *and* Yahoo if possible. If not, better a merger with *someone* than a dead Yahoo. I hardly care who runs the advertising services for a search engine I don't use.

MS Research is doing some good work, and ever since the day MS got serious about security (meaning they accepted the idea of networking), most of the teams have drastically improved. In databases, for example, it was MS that reacted to an age where the memory/cpu/io bandwidth/network bandwidth ratios are all stood on their head, and changed the assumptions of the optimizers.

As a result, if you fed today's typical, poorly written query against a poorly designed database to SQL Server 2005, it does a fantastic job of finding a sneaky way to make it fast, in ways others are just catching up to.

Bad news for me - I love query tuning - but hardware is cheap and labor isn't, and that's the way it is, and generic Java programmers without a clue write lousy db code, and that's the way it'll stay.

Still, that wasn't worth much without Windows Server 2003 SP2, because a stable platform was essential (as I am reminded by these bloody x64 servers...man, it's like the old days! They just commit suicide on you for no reason).

PowerShell - brilliant, aside from two things: syntax that would make the Unix "find" command blush, and like anything else object based: it's harder to navigate the namespace of "everything" that it is to navigate the menus in Outlook [I still want someone to sell "Outlook for ADD" with only the 5 commands I use].

Problem is, we've still got a world of techies who work ON Microsoft but not FOR Microsoft, and those are the guys who talk about the "MS Haters". They think it's like Yankees vs Mets.

It's weird to explain to someone who has never used anything else (I'm an old old Unix bigot) that peope like me aren't "MS Haters". But it all used to suck! Now, there's a great deal that doesn't suck (tho they always manage to include one thing that sucks badly in an otherwise good product). (Such as it taking weeks to rebuild a complex multi-instance SQL Server, because I can't just dd backups.)

Ain't no time to hate (working too many hours)! MS buying Yahoo is not automatically a bad idea (though it may indeed be a bad idea). And there's no reason for 'the media' to give basic business lessons and rehash basic research about companies for an article like this.

Sybase doesn't have the cash, does it? And I guess the stockholders there who were hoping Sun would buy Sybase instead of MySQL wouldn't like it.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

I didn't say MS is evil. I said that the media is playing us for fools. They can call this a "surprise move" when it wasn't.