As the weeks keep flying and nothing worthy of mentioning is happening after Yahoo! turned down Microsoft’s unsolicited bid, rumors are starting to get leaked and suppositions made. The lawsuits filed against the Sunnyvale-based company are something of lesser importance, because they are in a unsolvable situation whichever way the coin flips. Out of the seven suits, there are two accusing Yahoo! of encouraging MS to bid, and others that demand the sales as being in the shareholders’ best interest. It doesn’t matter what Yahoo! does, it will still get sued.

Google responded very quickly when Microsoft made the big announcement. In an instant, a press release was put together, deeming the bid as dangerous, and the next day, investment banker George Boutros was hired for advice. "Boutros is known in M&A circles as a briefcase slammer. […] The kind of negotiator who will do whatever it takes to make the other guy blink," Valleywag quoted Adam Lashinsky.

Two weeks’ work later, the solution presented to Google’s directors was that the Mountain View-based company should bid for just under 20 percent if Yahoo!’s stock at an inflated price. There are two theories as to why that is. The first, presented by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, is that "Google clearly wants to see the status quo continue in the search space, and would rather fight a fragmented market than a single, stronger, Microsoft/Yahoo."

The second has a lot more to do with chaos and mayhem, that would destabilize the two companies currently involved in their very own cold war right now: Microsoft shareholders are unhappy and penalized the Redmond giant severely by lowering its stock value, while Yahoo! is hit with lawsuits and has talent departing due to the vesting packages that just expired. If crazy is what Google’s after, it did a very good job. I wonder if the bid is actually made what will be to come.


Source: news.softpedia.com

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Yahoo is not, even by far, the only item on Microsoft’s shopping list. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates made it clear that, although he gave his blessing for the acquisition of Yahoo, a strategy cooked by Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer, the Sunnyvale Internet giant wouldn't become the company's exclusive focus in its race after Google. And while Yahoo will undoubtedly shorten the distance which separates Microsoft from the incontestable leader of the search engine and online advertising markets, by a consistent share, the Redmond company continues to climb its way toward Google slowly, through its own efforts, but also via additional acquisitions.

Of course that in comparison with the $44.6 billion price tag that Microsoft stuck to Yahoo, all other take-overs seem anodyne. Case in point: YaData, a developer of tools designed to identify unique customer segments. The financial details of the acquisition have not been made public, but it is reported that Microsoft paid between $20 and $30 million.

"The purchase of YaData brings the Israeli R&D center into the field of online advertising, which is undoubtedly one of Microsoft’s most strategic fields," said Moshe Lichtman, President of the Microsoft Israel R&D Center. "This is a great example of how Israeli technology has considerable value that is contributing to our most important areas of development. In recent months, I have become familiar with YaData's top quality personnel, and I am convinced that their contribution to the Israeli R&D center and to Microsoft globally will be significant."

Microsoft's Israel R&D center in Herzliya will grow with the addition of the YaData team, and the technology will be added to the Microsoft’s Advertiser and Publisher Solutions group. "YaData fully believes in the potential of behavioral targeting to enhance the value of online advertising for publishers, advertisers and users," said Amir Peleg, chief executive officer of YaData. "Microsoft has the resources to unlock the potential in YaData’s technology and create a truly innovative online advertising solution. We’re excited to see what the future holds."


Source: news.softpedia.com

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Opera announced that it has made Google the default search engine for its mobile browsers, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini. From now on, mobile users that work with Opera can access Google's search engine directly from the browser's start page, for a quick and easy way to get the information they need.

The new mobile collaboration between Opera and Google covers all global territories except Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (no idea why is that), and includes all of Opera's standard mobile browsers.

Opera might have chosen the G-search-engine over Yahoo (which was made the default search engine on Opera's mobile browsers a year ago) following countless complaints from consumers who were unhappy they couldn't make Google the default browser page. Moreover, Google has been the default search option on Opera's desktop browser for many years, so it's somehow natural that it now became the default for mobile browsers too.

"Google and Opera have established a valuable relationship over the years and we look forward to continued collaboration on mobile products," said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera. "With 2008 poised to be the year the mobile Web goes mainstream, Google and Opera are extending this collaboration to give our users immediate access to the quality and convenience of Google's search results. We're excited to extend this productive relationship and we hope that the nearly 100 million people using our mobile products will agree."

Opera Mini and Opera Mobile are the most popular mobile browsers in the world, being used on more than 100 million handsets. Opera Mini users, for example, browse more than 1.7 billion pages monthly. Both Opera's mobile browsers offer advanced features, specially adjusted for cell phones, including Opera Zoom, Opera Link and Speed Dial.

While Google recently introduced a new and improved search engine for mobile phones, Yahoo doesn't seem to care too much about the mobile side of the Web. Should we say "too bad", or should we be happy that Google won another pseudo-battle with Yahoo?


Source: news.softpedia.com

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The first ever SMX Search Bowl took place last night and had teams from Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com, Live Search and the SEM All Star Team line up at the starting line. A fierce battle they fought, dodging trick questions prepared by Search Engine Land, but in the end the cup was all the teams wanted and everything else was just insignificant. Sort of.

Like the title says, Google won, and did that
by a landslide. At the other end of the dais was the SEM All Star Team that at one point had a negative score. 50 questions were asked, and all were more or less difficult (mostly more), and the first team that buzzed had a chance to answer. In case they got it right, points were awarded, else they were subtracted from the total.

Google's team consisted of Matt Cutts and Paul Haahr, Senior Staff Software Engineer. Microsoft's team was made up of Nathan Buggia, Lead Program Manager, and Natala Menezes, Product Manager at adCenter. Ask.com had Peter Linsley, Senior Product Mgr, Search Technology, and Gary Price, Director of Online Resources. The SEM team had Todd Friesen and Ian Lurie.

Here are a couple of questions, as were posted on Search Engine Land:

The Sunday Times sent a legal request for which news search engine to stop crawling its content:
a) Excite NewsTracker
b) News Index – the right answer
c) Wired Newsbot

Which search engine first sold sponsored links?
a) GoTo
b) Open Text – the right answer
c) Excite

Don’t be fooled that they have b) as a correct answer, it wasn’t that easy. Too bad the final results weren’t posted, I really would have enjoyed seeing the exact difference, as the search engines sent their best qualified people at the event. I guess it was a measure of the employees’ levels of knowledge about their own companies as well as the others’. Glad to see Google coming first, else they couldn’t really justify their dominant position on the market.


Source: softpedia.com

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There’d be no reason for the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, if Yahoo! wasn’t afraid that it will soon be outmaneuvered by the Redmond software giant. The golden parachute plan revolves around the particular eventuality of a change-in-control severance, and it has two standing points.

Employees and executives being laid off in the first two years after
the eventual takeover will be given four months to two years’ pay, depending on the position they had when fired. To prevent any attempt to minimalize costs on Microsoft’s behalf, such as, say, demoting everybody so that the severance pay is littler, there was a clause inserted that includes employees leaving for good reasons and the above is a damned good one.

It doesn’t mean that Microsoft will actually do it, it would be a faux pas without precedent and the turning point of the public’s opinion of the company, and you have got to admit that the Redmond giant isn’t exactly looked at with love wherever it turns.

Health and dental coverage for the length of the employees’ severance awards is included, "as well as reimbursement of outplacement services up to two years, or a maximum of $15,000, depending on job title," news.com reports. The packages are set up to accomplish several things: "help retain the employees, help maintain a stable work environment and provide certain economic benefits to the employees in the event their employment is terminated (under certain circumstances)," as Yahoo wrote in the filing.

Fun fact: the golden parachute also covers Yahoo!’s Chief Executive Officer Jerry Yang, and should he leave under the explained circumstances, he too would be eligible for the severance packages. However, I couldn’t say that his leaving and getting two years’ worth of pay would bleed Microsoft dry, as his annual salary is only $1.


Source: news.softpedia.com

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Just the other day I had to send a very important personal message to apologize for something I had done and after taking my time (about an hour) to make it sound really humble and actually confer the feeling of how sorry I was, I clicked my mouse on the "Send" button and, conscience lighter, I went about my other businesses. Only to find out the second day, when I managed to conjure up the guts to attempt a phone call, that the message hadn’t reached its destination. After checking and double-checking the address, I concluded that it wasn’t my fault. Not that it’d change the situation I was in, but still.

I chanced upon a Yahoo! Mail Blog as soon as it was posted, and all was clear. There has been a very frustrating delay in delivering messages via email clients such as Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail and so on. Apparently, there’s a surge in traffic through the POP / SMTP servers that’s causing the time difference between the moment a message is sent and when it is received.

The Yahoo! team in charge came up with two solutions, out of which one was bad. They thought they had covered the delay with a clever tweak, but they didn’t (and caused my trouble) and as a result of their failure a hardware upgrade was made. Some work has been put into the bandwidth allocation mode of the new servers, so any possible future situations don’t happen in the first place.

… a statement to be taken with a grain of salt. I tested it after changing my settings as the picture on the left shows (the official fix) and out of 10 messages I sent to myself, only 6 of them were delivered instantly, with three others arriving between 45 and 50 minutes late and another being 9 minutes overdue. Not like the initial day and a half of delay I encountered, but I can’t say I’m very pleased with it.


Source: news.softpedia.com

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Yahoo! put an end to all the speculations around Microsoft’s unsolicited bid on Monday. The answer was a big no, thank you, and the motivation was that the Sunnyvale-based company’s board considered that the offer greatly undervalued Yahoo! The proposal of $44.6 billion, or $31 per share, was forwarded to the Internet giant on the first of February.

The rejection couldn’t go unanswered, so Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO issued a statement saying, among others, that "A Microsoft-Yahoo! combination will create a more effective company that would provide greater value and service to our customers. Furthermore,
the combination will create a more competitive marketplace by establishing a compelling number two competitor for Internet search and online advertising. The Yahoo! response does not change our belief in the strategic and financial merits of our proposal. As we have said previously, Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo!’s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal."

The last phrase gave birth to a lot of controversy regarding what all of those "necessary steps" might be, a hostile takeover being what everybody instantly thought about. Nobody dared compete with Microsoft head on regarding the Yahoo! deal, but several companies reportedly had some talks with the Internet company about eventual alliances that would save Jerry Yang’s firm from being forced to sell. Google was the first, but its interest won after realizing that regulators would not allow it to happen and AOL came second, but that was mostly the rumor mill working its magic. The most serious of all was News Corp, and messages being sent back and forward between Murdoch and Yang were reported in the press.

Tuesday, the Redmond-based company officially confirmed that Windows 7 and Office 14 would not be confined to desktops only. Eyeing the tremendous growth of its online counterparts from Google in particular and some other companies, Microsoft decided to implement its own branded strategy with Software plus Services.

"On the consumer side, though, our work will be anchored in a few core things. Windows and Office need to embrace the Internet and go live, and we’ve got good efforts underway and in market for both Windows Live and Office Live," CEO Steve Ballmer said after, the previous day, Chairman Bill Gates had underlined the importance of blending the desktop-based Office System with services in the clouds.

The peer to peer copyrighted file sharing scandal that has been roaming the Internets (© George W. Bush) for the past month or so, with renewed vigor, convinced Microsoft to conduct a survey among students between the seventh and tenth grade, and its results found that most of them were not aware of the laws in state. Wednesday was educational day for the Redmond-based company, so it launched an interactive web site, http://www.mybytes.com for the young to develop their own intellectual property and assign usage rights, by mixing music online to create a custom riff for downloading as a ringtone, according to Press Pass.

49 percent of the respondents said that they were not familiar with the laws and the penalties for such crimes, while only 11 percent admitted to knowing "very well" what the regulations were. The rest answered that they were aware that illegal downloading wasn’t a good thing and said that some rules were clear, but rather in a big haze.

"Widespread access to the Internet has amplified the issue of intellectual property rights among children and teens," said Sherri Erickson, global manager, Genuine Software Initiative for Microsoft for Press Pass. "This survey provides more insight into the disparity between IP awareness and young people today and highlights the opportunity for schools to help prepare their students to be good online citizens."

Valentine’s Day didn’t deliver on the love, but it compensated with the best known surrogate: promotion. Not one, but fourteen, and all at the top. It was the 14th after all, so they kind of had to go with that number.

These came to reflect the company’s commitment to maintain and furthermore built a strong and dynamic management team across its unique portfolio of businesses. "Along with attracting world-class talent from outside the company, one of my top priorities is growing Microsoft’s existing leadership team. […] Each of these executives will play a critical role in leading Microsoft into the future. Today’s promotions are a result of their ability to think strategically on a global scale, the respect they’ve earned from their peers, customers and partners, and their significant contributions to the company," said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft.

The seven executives that were promoted to senior vice president are Chris Capossela, Kurt DelBene, Antoine Leblond, Andy Lees, Satya Nadella, S. Somasegar and Bill Veghte, and the seven executives promoted to corporate vice president are Walid Abu-Habda, Brad Brooks, Larry Cohen, Steve Guggenheimer, Scott Guthrie, Roz Ho and Brian Tobey. Best of luck to them all!

On Friday, news came out about long time security giants Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro being bested by Microsoft’s alternative, the lesser known Forefront, in terms of performance. It was widely less resources consuming, using 60 percent of what Symantec threw at it, the AntiVirus Corporate Edition 10.2. Compared to the same product, Microsoft Forefront proved to be able to deliver 13 times faster boot times and more than twice greater speed at quick scans.

This study was conducted to test Forefront Client Security’s system performance compared
to the three leading competitive products. Testing was carried out during April and May 2007. The study shows that Microsoft Forefront Client Security’s results were favorable, compared to those of two of the leading competitors. It uses few system resources on servers and is comparable to the leading competitor in scanning times on both older and newer machines, and also when scanning .cab files. West Coast Labs also found that when malware was discovered, Microsoft’s bandwidth usage on clients was the lowest of all the four products," revealed a member of Microsoft Switzerland.


Source: news.softpedia.com

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Yahoo Inc.'s board plans to reject Microsoft Corp.'s unsolicited $44.6 billion offer to acquire the Web giant, a person familiar with the situation says.

After a series of meetings over the past week, Yahoo's board determined that the $31 per share offer "massively undervalues" Yahoo, the person said. It also doesn't account for the risks Yahoo would be taking by entering into an agreement that might be overturned by regulators. The board plans to send a letter to Microsoft Monday, spelling out its position.

Yahoo's board believes that Microsoft's is trying to take advantage of the recent weakness in the company's share price to "steal" the company. The decision to reject the offer signals that Yahoo's board is digging in its heels for what could be a long takeover battle. The company is unlikely to consider any offer below $40 per share, the person said.

It's unclear whether Microsoft would be willing to pay such a premium, which would increase the value of its original cash and stock bid by more than $12 billion. The rejection comes as Yahoo's board has been considering various other scenarios, including a search advertising partnership Google Inc. Yahoo's directors are still considering that and other options that would safeguard the company's independence, people close the company say.

Yahoo's board appears to be betting that Microsoft doesn't want to "go hostile" and try to acquire the company against the wishes of management and the board. Such a course could cause deep resentment among the rank-and-file engineers whose cooperation is crucial to the company's success. A hostile takeover could also make it more difficult to get the deal past regulators if Yahoo management tries to convince authorities that the deal is anticompetitive.

Yahoo has taken "poison pill" provisions to prevent an unwanted takeover. Microsoft would likely have to oust the board in order to overturn them.

Source:
http://rajamonyet.blogspot.com
online.wsj.com

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The whole week was pretty slow when it came to what everybody expected to come true, Yahoo! accepting the offer that Microsoft put on its table, so everything else kind of remained in this deal’s shade. Nevertheless, the Redmond-based company managed to keep its employees focused on their tasks at hand, so Monday, Windows Vista Service Pack 1, the apple of so many engineers’ eye, was released to manufacturing alongside Windows Server 2008.

The date for the release of SP 1 was not pinned, but it is said to come somewhere in March, while Windows Server 2008 will be available to new clients as of March the first, and Microsoft Volume Licensing customers that have an active Microsoft Software Assurance coverage, or an Enterprise Agreement, will be able to download it earlier. There will be an event to mark it, part of the joint Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 "Heroes Happen Here" launch.

The Windows Vista Service Pack 1 was expected for over one year, ever since
the official launch of the Operating System. What was broadcasted at the time as the best Windows to come so far turned out to be a bitter disappointment to some, who saw numerous vulnerabilities shipped along with the OS. Patches and updates that came afterwards managed to smooth the transition from XP to Vista in reliability and performance, but they were never enough. The wave of complaints will finally come to en end in March… hopefully.

Meanwhile, on the Yahoo! front, Google’s David Drummond, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer, jumped at Microsoft’s throat, claiming that the unsolicited bid would "extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet."

Tuesday was the first day of the Microsoft Office Visio conference 2008, where delegates got to take a peak at the features that are to come with the next release of Visio. Add to that a keynote addressing the company’s future vision for the product, delivered by Jeff Raikes, the President of the Microsoft Business Division, and you can see why 250 seats weren’t enough.

"The fundamental premise behind Visio is that a picture is worth a thousand words. The ability to represent data in a visually-rich way really brings information to the surface in a way you just don’t get from raw data. Visio allows users to zero in on the relevant information to get the clarity they need to drive timely, informed decision-making. This is a capability that’s becoming more and more valued by organizations amid the ever-increasing volume of data they face, and we’re certainly seeing Visio’s problem-solving capabilities pretty squarely aligned with some of the biggest growth opportunities for organizations today," Richard Wolf, General Manager told Press Pass.

Apparently, the next Visio release will attend to what users have been asking for a long time, such as a new ‘fluent’ user interface, which is very important because it allows more of the product’s functionality to be exposed. It will also smoothen the learning curve for new Visio users by being able to use the ribbon (another way Wolf called the fluent user interface) just in the same manner as they would any of the Office tools.

News that Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, called CEO Jerry Yang in order to offer his company’s help surfaced, and Microsoft suddenly started having chills running down its spine.

The middle of the week brought the best news for small businesses and their owners, as Microsoft decided to give the world a version of Microsoft Outlook 2007, complemented with Business Contact Manager on Wednesday. "Small-business owners need effective solutions for managing their customer base. […] Currently, many small and home-based businesses keep their contacts in several different places — some in Rolodexes, some in spreadsheets. We understand the importance of good customer management and are providing simple and affordable solutions to help small businesses centralize their customer information so that keeping track of customers is more effective and less time-consuming," said Takeshi Numoto, general manager of Microsoft Office 2007 at Microsoft.

The new standalone product offers all the functionality of MS Office Outlook 2007, and thus making it easy for small businesses to track their sales and market activities ‘under one roof’. It was released due to the success that the 2007 edition had, that noted nearly 2 million registered users, taking advantage of the 28 languages the product comes in.

Google decided to stop Microsoft’s attempt to take over Yahoo! by all means, so it started lobbying at Capitol Hill, figuring that it’s payback time for the time MS told on its acquisition of DoubleClick. Important people from the Mountain View-based company have highlighted just why the deal shouldn’t go through in front of the lawmakers, leaving Microsoft’s lobbying somewhere in the shade.

Privacy and security first and foremost, cried Microsoft Corp, Google, Yahoo! and IBM on Thursday, as they all joined the OpenId Foundation. They sat at the round table and each brought forth what it had to offer, namely expertise in Internet and security technology.

The point of the Foundation is to empower users with portable Internet identities, or OpenIDs, that would let people have control over the way their personal information is to be used online, not to mention that it would simplify the management of digital identities. "With this support from these new company board members, the OpenID Foundation will be able to continue to promote and protect the technology and its community moving forward. […] The community has expanded quickly since the inception of the foundation, and these companies will help bring OpenID into the mainstream markets," said Bill Washburn, executive director of the OpenID Foundation.

Yahoo decided to level the playing field in the small businesses area, and although it did not roll out a competitor to Microsoft’s Outlook 2007 doubled with the Business Contact Manager, the Sunnyvale-based company announced that they have leveled all the fees they charged for hosting the services and for the traffic they had. To top that already marvelous piece of news, an "unlimited storage" sticker was glued on its cover and it was ready to ship and skyrocket Yahoo!’s customer base.

Jerry Yang addressed a second mail to all his employees, letting them know that no decision had been taken.

Friday, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, addressed Yahoo! indirectly and let the world know that the Sunnyvale-based company’s brand will remain untouched, should they decide to accept the unsolicited bid. Many casualties are to come, due to the similarities of services both Microsoft and Yahoo! offer. Count Live Search and Windows Live Messenger are casualties of the great takeover war, because if the Yahoo! brand is prominent, there’s no way they could live together. United, under one name, and that will have Yahoo! up front.

Kevin Johnson, President, Platform & Services Division, said that "A key synergy we’ve identified in this combination is really about expanded R&D capability. It doesn’t make sense to have thousands of engineers at Yahoo working on a search index, thousands of engineers at Microsoft working on the same search index. By combining, we can have one team of people across the two companies working on the search index, and then have others continue to focus on areas where we’ve defined differentiation in search. New search verticals and expanded user experience for search."

As midday approached, a new problem emerged for Microsoft: Yahoo!’s rising shares and its own declining ones made the bid look weak, compared to the possibilities of stock holders to sell on the open market. How that turns out will be an interesting story to follow.


Source: news.softpedia.com

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Yahoo Messenger 9 is expected to bring a totally new chating experience to all its fans out there and the Sunnyvale company really struggles to reach this goal.
Following the recent implementation of several new functions (embeddable clips displayed straight into the YM window, new contact list and others), the folks at Yahoo rolled out a brand new security function of the Yahoo Messenger users: automatic file scanning for consumers of Norton Antivirus 2007/2008 and Norton Internet Security 2007/2008, all of them for the Windows operating system.

The interoperability means that every time a user who installed one of the mentioned Symantec software solutions receives a file on Yahoo Messenger, it is automatically scanned in the background and, in case there's something dangerous, the access/execution is blocked. With a continuously growing number of computer infections attempting to spread themselves on instant messengers, this function should be expanded to other security vendors in order to protect a wider segment of users.

Please note that this auto-scanning functions only works with Norton Antivirus 2007/2008 or Norton Internet Security 2007/2008 and Yahoo Messenger 9.0.0.222 Beta or above.

"Chat is a great way to spontaneously get photos or other files from friends and family. It’s also an easy way to inadvertently get a virus or spyware onto your computer. Yahoo engineered Yahoo IM 9.0 with special antivirus integration capabilities. Symantec responded immediately by partnering with Yahoo to deliver a new, tighter level of integration between Yahoo IM 9.0 and Norton Internet Security 2007/2008 and Norton AntiVirus 2007/2008. Norton is the first and only antivirus software to take advantage of this new feature of Yahoo IM," the official page of the Symantec/Yahoo Messenger deal reads.

Source: news.softpedia.com

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Long have I complained about the fact that the Yahoo! Messenger team did nothing whatsoever to improve their products and instead preferred to bring up front the older features that they thought people weren’t using. And up until today they've never failed with the disappointment, they were like clockwork.

The refresh that the Instant Messenger service got for its Vista version came as a gentle breeze to remind us that once in a blue moon things can be done. It’s been attended carefully and several things have been added or fixed, as follows.

Visually, they’ve cleaned up and enhanced some menus (image picker included), offline messages are shown in a
conversation window and have been added a timestamp and a new "While you were out" tag. Performance and stability have also been dealt with, the new version of the client (2008.01.11.428) is sensibly more stable and it responds a lot faster to typing or switching between tabs and windows, as the Yahoo! Messenger blog reads. Some work has been put into the sidebar that the IM came with, so those who wanted to use it, but were annoyed by the bugs, can now rest assured and start it up with confidence.

And talking about bugs, many of them have been squashed with the refresh: the sign in problems that some encountered were fixed and what managed to piss off everybody I know who uses it, the scrolling of the window has been reconsidered. It was fairly annoying to have to manually scroll down in order to see every single message received.

Hopefully, they’ll keep up the good work and not stop at this, there’s still room for more improvement both for the Vista version and the XP one. Off the top of my head, I could think of the sounds that have been changed with the latest versions, so now a BUZZ!! is more like a distorted excuse for a doorbell and receiving messages isn’t so prominent any more. Of course, you can manually change those, but it would have been nicer to have the option to switch to and from them at your free will.

Source: news.softpedia.com

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In its race to become the runner-up on the search engine and online advertising markets, Microsoft is about to give Google a little something to chew on. The Redmond company is looking to buy Yahoo for no less the $44.6 billion. Microsoft has just announced the proposed acquisition of Yahoo for $31 per share. According to current estimates, the transaction is valued at no less than $44.6 billion and Microsoft is to offer both cash and stock. Yahoo
has been increasingly losing its position on the search engine market, as well as its audience eroded by social networks.

The latest financial results posted by the Sunnyvale Internet giant feature a consistent loss, with profit dropping to $660 million for 2007, down from $751 million in 2006. Yahoo was even preparing to lay off a reported 1,000 workers of its 14,300 workforce, after the poor financial results of the past year. Microsoft's proposed acquisition offers shareholders a 62% premium to current trading price for Yahoo! The Redmond company has presented its proposition to Yahoo's Board of Directors.

"We have great respect for Yahoo!, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market," said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft. "We believe our combination will deliver superior value to our respective shareholders and better choice and innovation to our customers and industry partners."

"Our lives, our businesses, and even our society have been progressively transformed by the Web, and Yahoo! has played a pioneering role by building compelling, high-scale services and infrastructure," said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft. "The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our own."

Yahoo has failed to officially respond or comment on the acquisition proposal from Microsoft. Still, it is clear that the Redmond company will not hesitate in the least to cough up no less than $44.6 billion for Yahoo. The aims is of course the online advertising market, which is estimated to double in the next couple of years, from $40 billion in 2007 to nearly $80 billion by 2010. Microsoft revealed that the move to buy Yahoo was made as a measure to counter Google and its increasing dominance over the online advertising market.

"The combined assets and strong services focus of these two companies will enable us to achieve scale economics while reaching R&D critical mass to deliver innovation breakthroughs," said Kevin Johnson, president of the Platforms & Services Division of Microsoft. "The industry will be well served by having more than one strong player, offering more value and real choice to advertisers, publishers and consumers."

Source: news.softpedia.com

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