Thank goodness that nonsense is over. Perhaps now we can get back to focusing on a compelling desktop story.
(With Excel at the centre of course)
The bad news (poor Q1/Q3?? performance) got released and buried under the pile of Yahoo speculation. Job done.
I wonder what the diversion will be next quarter – buying Google? buying Red Hat? Windows 7 beta?
What do you reckon?
Did anyone seriously think buying Yahoo was a good thing? who for?
[EDIT]
I reckon Yahoos share price will plummet, MS could probably buy them for half the price in 6 months.
cheers
Simon
Sunday, 4th May, 2008 at 7:56 pm |
If you owned yahoo would you have sold? Damm stright I would have!
Sunday, 4th May, 2008 at 9:39 pm |
Does anyone actually use Yahoo? To my way of thinking, Yahoo’s popularity died out about 8-10 years ago.
I will say that if I’d been a Yahoo shareholder, I’d have to be seriously questioning the decisions of Jerry Yang. Isn’t his job to get the best deal for his shareholders? MS (foolishly, IMO) offered a pretty good premium for those shares, and Ballmer’s letter to him pretty much accused him of being willing to sabotage the company had a hostile bid had gone forth… hardly the actions of someone who seems to have the best interest of his shareholders at heart, is it?
Monday, 5th May, 2008 at 12:26 am |
I used to use Yahoo, I still have a couple of throwaway yahoo email addresses, which catch one message per 1000 spams (and the spam has dropped off in the last several years). But after the first time I used Google, years ago, I realized no other search engine came close.
If I owned Yahoo stock, and Microsoft (or anyone) came along and offered to buy it, I think I’d have tried to sell before the buyer came to their senses.
Too late.
Monday, 5th May, 2008 at 2:14 am |
i’ve used a myyahoo page as my home page for about 9 years, with stocks of companies my clients compete with in “portfolios” so that I can watch for news, plus a couple of weather forecasts (my home and my hometown). They came up with a new and improved version that I tried for about a week, but its performance with firefox was seriously broken, so I reverted to the old version, and now have to endure a constant box at the top suggesting that I “upgrade” to the new one. They somehow broke my favorite feature–one of the options was a mapping interface that stopped working (under Firefox anyway) about a year ago. Once in a while it worked, but I abandoned it and added a link to google maps. I liked the old yahoo maps because they were clean and you could choose categories of businesses (Restaurants-all, restaurants-chinese, etc.) without doing a search like you have to in google. I tried an igoogle page one day but didn’t have the time to set up everything.
Searching, of course, is google.com exclusively, since about 1999 when I read about it in a column in InfoWorld.
Monday, 5th May, 2008 at 9:43 am |
Yahoo isn’t as valuable as a search engine as much as it is as a portal. It is still the number #1 visited domain on the internet (some rankings have it at #2). That allows it to display a lot of advertising beyond just search ads.
Personally, I’m happy that the deal feel through. I know it’s not going to happen, but I wish they’d get back to focusing on developers and *real* user experience. They’ve lost their way.
Monday, 5th May, 2008 at 2:01 pm |
yahoo down 17% in Germany, but still above the pre MS era.
Never mind that, how should MS spend (/invest) the spare 44 bn usd?
classic ui? VBA update?
Monday, 5th May, 2008 at 11:31 pm |
interesting views here:
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/138091.asp?source=mypi
Tuesday, 6th May, 2008 at 1:17 am |
Good link, Simon. Michael Cusumano nails it.
Tuesday, 6th May, 2008 at 7:58 pm |
another excellent take on this stuff here:
http://news.digitaltrends.com/talkback244.html
Wednesday, 7th May, 2008 at 11:56 pm |
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=YHOO&t=6m&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=
judging by that chart I reckon there are a few shareholders still hopeful that MS will swoop in once the price has dropped.
Friday, 28th November, 2008 at 6:57 pm |
Have Yahoo now taken their bat home. I downloaded IE8 (beta) a couple of months ago and Yahoo has this week decided that my browser isn’t supported when I use IE to visit their sites. No problem to me as I do most browsing in firefox which only lets me down with OWA