f13.net

It's on. I have shares involved. Not talking, linking.

link (http://news.google.com/news?q=microsoft+yahoo&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&sa=N&tab=wn)

Headline is misleading. They are making an offer. Doesn't mean the shareholders will accept. Also needs to clear anti-trust hurdles.

Headline is not misleading when the offer is $31 a share and the recent share price is $18.

Edit - And when 1000 people (http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/01/30/yahoo-sacks-1000-workers) are headed down Semel Drive (http://valleywag.com/351420/terry-semel-leaves-yahoo-for-good-gets-street-named-after-him).

I haven't read a Yahoo prospectus in over 10 years but I bet it's going depend a lot on how much stock the "old timers" still hold and whether or not they want to do this. Plus again it'll have to pass anti-trust muster. In particular the EU may have issues given how much anti-trust trouble Microsoft's been having over there.

The EU is turning into America, Jr. It's like they caught wind of how much money could be made by being litigious bastards and ran with the idea. Not that Microsoft is squeaky clean, but there are other companies just as lawsuit-worthy.  :grin:

Back to the topic at hand, I'm not sure how I feel about Microsoft owning Flickr someday. I suppose it could work.

I guess this means the whole "Live" thing was a failure.

Or maybe this is the thing that'll put it over the top.

According to this cat, it will be a done deal:
http://paul.kedrosky.com/

When Yahoo bought Geocities my email addy got a .geo appended to it and became a yahoo address.  Now that MS is buying yahoo I wonder if they will append a .yah to my .geo and change it to an msn.com address?

Glad I made decision to use jQuery javascript framework instead of YUI (Yahoo User Interface)…
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/what-happens-if-microsoft-buys-yahoo

They won't have a lot of choice. With a cash bid that high, their Revlon duties will be such that they can't really turn it down.

A friend at Yahoo! says he will sell his shares if they put a ! on the end of Microsoft

http://labs.live.com/photosynth/view.html?collection=sanmarco/index1.sxs

But watch out for some scurrilous terms and conditions.

I reckon they'll be a mass exodus and/or RIF… …not immediate, but these merger deals are destructive… …redundancy, plus, some will no doubt, cash out and opt to explore other career venues, be it newly minted ISV or enjoying pina coladas on a tropical beach…

Money people going to rake in a lot of dough, but damage will be done to the intellectual assets of both firms. M$ is already dead on the inside, living off the laurels of a desktop monopoly (in the business/corporate world) that's the equivalent of billions of tollbooths that sit on worker desks… …and everytime M$ has mingled with some F/OSS (of which Yahoo is heavy duty), it's not been a fruitful experience. I don't think the leaves are colored any different in 2008.

Of course I wonder about EU. I remember working for Honeywell when GE bought out and my entire department was told that Operation Shutdown was in effect, and we had like 9-12 months as GE would consolidate and eliminate many Honeywell redundant departments… …then the EU nixed it (after U.S. stamped it OK without nary a thought) — moral in my department never recovered, and most everybody was just marking the days to retirement or leaving anyway… …of course, that ends up being a clusterfuck of immense proportions as a harried staff has to support all the systems from cannibalized company purchases…

How do you solve this?

http://yahoo7.com.au
http://ninemsn.com.au

That's the two top TV networks in Australia, Nine and Seven - one in a joint venture with MSN, the other with Yahoo, using their respective US technologies. Those TV networks are BITTER rivals in the ratings war who don't even speak to each other.

Edit - I need to link this Steve Ballmer video and I'm not making another post for it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvsboPUjrGc

I would assume you solve it by not giving a fuck. No offense to my friends down under, but I'm pretty sure Australia has less TV watchers than, say, North Dakota. Or Canada, America's Hat.

Basically, in a deal this big, that sort of shit doesn't matter even one tiny bit. At all. Not even a little.

When you have $15 billion you can dance around like a moron and not care what people think.

Nice job on the 48% gain in one day though!

We know that. But we've still got to solve it.

Newshoo! (http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g9cE_gI-aemyNxZQb7YOBC3rsNlQD8UPRA5G3)
Yahfox! (http://www.news.com/Yahoo-seen-in-News-Corp.-talks,-but-analysts-dubious/2100-1030_3-6230534.html?tag=nefd.top)

So the one company widely considered more evil than MS is trying to buy Yahoo. Interesting. If I were Bill Gates I'd start trying to buy stuff Fox buys. All he'd have to tell the shareholders is "Hey, at least I'm not Murdoch!"

(http://indiescribe.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/wallstreet20_2.jpg)


  "The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed -- for lack of a better word -- is good. Greed is right. Greed works.  Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.  Greed, in all of its forms -- greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind." 

Microsoft just abandoned their bid for Yahoo. (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080504/bs_nm/microsoft_yahoo_dc_12)  Anybody shorting yahoo is laughing and those holding out for a better deal are screwed!

At $28, I turned my Yahoo shares into a new bed. It's very comfortable, perfect for lying back and watching.

Were they really being that greedy in asking for so much more per share? I wish I understood mergers/take overs/buy outs better.

I'm surprised that MSFT didn't take this to a proxy fight.

I found the discussion  (http://messages.finance.yahoo.com/Business_%26_Finance/Investments/Stocks_%28A_to_Z%29/Stocks_Y/forumview?bn=20360)motherlode on the Yahoo Finance YHOO stock discussion board. This kind (http://messages.finance.yahoo.com/Stocks_%28A_to_Z%29/Stocks_Y/threadview?m=tm&bn=20360&tid=913780&mid=913780&tof=5&frt=2) of thing.


Some more:

I loathe the stock market.

I don't know, it's a huge game of chicken really.  Microsoft swore up and down that they would never increase the price and got all belligerent about it, but they did wind up upping it, by five billion dollars.  It wasn't unreasonable to think they might go higher.  It might also not have been all about money, a lot of the people making the decision to sell wouldn't want to work for Microsoft.  I was reading another article that in order to keep the best employees (which is all a software company really consists of) Microsoft was expecting to spend many billions more to keep them around knowing how much people don't like them.

I guess they have been talking to a lot of the major shareholders about what price they would sell at, their price was too high and Microsoft probably didn't think they would get enough to win a proxy fight.

They will probably let the stock tank and then buy them up in the summer only this time the speculators who thought Microsoft would do this at any cost won't be boosting Yahoo's price because they got burned so bad this time.  If I was a gambling man I'd buy some Yahoo once it bottoms...

OP has been deleted but not the thread for some reason, some sick fucks in there.

What does Yahoo even do anymore to make them worth anything? Serious question.

Uh, it's the number one or number two most trafficked site on the internet. And it's called advertising.

But I mean, what are people going there FOR? Google has something close to a monopoly on the search engine biz.

Really? I mean, REALLY STRAZOS? Yahoo is fucking everywhere, even if 90% of it is for yokels.

I'll have to take your word for it.

Yahoo has the largest email user base (MS is 2nd). It has the 1st or 2nd largest IM user base (MS is 1st or 2nd). It's also the largest "portal" site (MS is 2nd).

I find it hard to believe that more people use YIM than MSN or AIM. Particularly with all the legacy AIM users.

It's a side-effect of having the largest email user base. I couldn't tell you which service actually has the most active users/traffic.

Yahoo is my home page actually. I like it's set-up for checking on the news quickly.

I use it for my homepage too, I really like it even though I didn't like the recent changes they forced on us.  I can see my mail, various news services, comics, most clicked on pictures, stocks, dictionary, weather, calendar and more all on one page.

News is also huge on Yahoo because it licenses everybody else's news - all the wire services and many other sources. It doesn't produce any news itself. So everyone uses Yahoo News to link to, and it comes up in searches all the time too.

Remember, web ads are charged per 1000 clicks (read this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_per_mille)). Each web page serves ads. The more clicks you are getting, the more times the ads are being shown to people, and that equals money. With all the page views added together, Yahoo US is the number one site on the Internet, serving billions and billions of pages, and there are individual Yahoos in every country, many of which are their nation's top website (it has done particularly well in Asia). Yahoo is also number two in search behind Google - it doesn't have a very large share, because Google is so dominant, but being number two means it's the alternative for search ads and search marketing, which are huge. Yahoo also owns Flickr.

Basically it has everything, so it gets traffic. You might not be arriving through their front page, but everyone clicks on something that is on Yahoo. Problem is, I think, many people are unaware they are visiting Yahoo (as opposed to knowing they are "Googling"), which has been bad for perceptions of what the company does and therefore probably the share price - perhaps that is why they insisted their company was worth more than the offer.

Pre-Market: 22.82 -5.85 (-20.40%)  May 5 8:17am ET

That's a long ways away from the $37 a share they were asking for.

Meanwhile Google: Pre-Market: 600.01 +18.72 (3.22%)  May 5 8:26am ET

Yahoo Fantasy Sports is pretty big too.

I go to yahoo to check on local movie times.

AIM is #1 IM.

Anyways, this is interesting. I know Yahoo! doesn't want to merge with MSFT, they would rather sell out CHEAP to someone else than for extra $$ from MSFT.

The comment about retaining important, good employees is also interesting, as I think a lot of them have already left Yahoo! or at least looking. As more and more bids/buyouts get involved, more and more employees will be jumping ship. No matter what happens Yahoo! won't be the same as it use to be.

I expect some serious talks between Yahoo and TWX to happen regarding folding Yahoo! into AOL (or vise versa) as TWX would love to dump AOL for a stake in the large share of online marketing that Yahoo+AOL would make. Still not Google-sized, but much better than either one of those by themselves.

Edit: If you want to know traffic, Comscore is typically the service used to measure traffic to sites and thus the "potential" advertising revenue those sites can generate. There's not any place (that I can find) that just lists out the sites, but you can usually find them referenced in press releases. Like this one: http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2184

Looks like there are some big bets on someone still buying Yahoo, or something. It climbed from the opening $22 and only fell to $24.37 (from $28.67) despite 280 million volume traded, so there's a lot of buying at relatively high prices still going on. Remember, Yahoo shares were trading in the high teens before Microsoft made its original bid.

Some believe gentlemen prefer blondes. Yahoo goes with the brunette. (http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/12/technology/yahoo_google.ap/index.htm?postversion=2008061218)

Brunettes are where it's at afterall.