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I'm trying to think of escape routes for Yahoo and I'm not have much luck. The only thing that keeps bouncing around in my head is, what would happen if people just started buying Yahoo stock to drive the price up so that the MS deal didn't look so good? I realize it would never happen, but what would shareholders do? Are the shareholders so bent on returns on their investment that they would kill Yahoo for it? In a world where WalMart is still allowed to exist and Cigarettes are still legal, it doesn't surprise me that people still haven't figured out that MS is EVIL and nothing short of an EU beatdown is going to change their ways. They've already bought the US government, so the Justice Dept. justs slaps their wrist every few years and fines them $3-$6 million dollars. Bill has that in his couch between the cushions probably. I just hope that if the deal goes through, they sell of Zimbra first, preferably to Google. Microsoft will KILL that whole project before the ink dries on the title to Yahoo's corporate deed.
**edit** I should point out that I don't own any Yahoo, MS, or Google stock. I just don't like the idea of MS gaining ANY advantage until Google/Apple smacks them down a few notches.
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You got to be kidding. Spending money to thwart MS because you don't like them? Obligatory Walmart bashing as if people universally believe they are evil?
Like I give a dmn about Yahoo much less saving them? Is this one of the great social issues of my time I have been missing out on?
Wrong forum.
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Nah, just save Flickr. Then we're cool.
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I've got some buddies who work at Yahoo. While they're thrilled about the stock price jump due to announcement, they're very scared of being absorbed by the Borg.
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>>Spending money to thwart MS because you don't like them?
No, because their goals are directly at odds. Yahoo innovates with open technology while MS creates their own "standards" even to their own detriment.
even those who are fairly positive about the deal can't see MS doing much with yahoo aside from shutting it down.
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This is what happens when you lose your focus. Yahoo brought this on themselves.
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Imagine shareholders being "bent on returns". Sounds horrible. Those selfish meanies.
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I'm not saying that Yahoo shouldn't be profitable, or that it doesn't need to be, but rather should the return on investment come at the exclusion of all else? On the surface, looking at just the numbers, the MS offer is difficult to ignore. But in the bigger picture, if they managed to change all of the Yahoo apps to use MS Products (Linux is out, MySQL is out, Apache is out, PHP is out, the list goes on and on), dump anything that competes with MS Products (Zimbra, Konfabulator, who knows what else), and dump everything that is still in R&D and then expect the Yahoo brand to still compete with Google...well it would be a waste of $45 Billion dollars to in my opinion. The MS brand certainly won't compete with Google. Their only hope is to refocus Yahoo, and make it into Microsoft's Google. Keep the Yahoo name and try to keep anyone from knowing that it has ANYTHING to do with MS. If MS did that, I think that it would actually be a benefit for Yahoo. Part of what makes Google Google is that they use the best tools for the job, and if the tool doesn't exist, they make it. If it needs to be modified, they can because it is free, open-source software. Microsoft would NEVER buy into that philosophy though unless there is a major shift in their philosophy. From what I can gather, Yahoo has been profitable, just not like it was in the late '90s, and no where near where Google is.
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I had forgotten Yahoo was still around until I heard about the buyout offer.
Sorry.
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I knew some of the people that were involved in the Hotmail startup. Many of them became millionaires and eventually either quit in disgust (forcing them to convert it to IIS instead of UNIX resulted in two almost complete outages) or were let go. Microsoft came very close to killing it off when they sold the user database to spammers.
Bungie/Halo is the ONLY example I can think of where a company got bought out by Microsoft and stayed viable, and it started out as Mac developer.
