Microsoft was offering a measurably greater sum than the market value of Yahoo!'s stock.
Yahoo!'s stock is where it is largely BECAUSE people were anticipating a Microsoft buyout.
Every indication is that Google is slowly eating Yahoo’s market share.
Allegedly, Yahoo! sought out mergers with other media giants like Time Warner, News Corp. etc., but none would bite, at least not yet.
I don’t get it. Why would they turn down what certainly appears to me to be not only a sweetheart deal, but a sweetheart deal that won’t come around again and would save the company from slowly bleeding to death?
Short answer: it’s impossible to really say what their thinking is. It may just be the CEO not wanting to have another boss. This may not stop Microsoft, though. Hostile takeovers and all.
Why does MicroSoft want it? Does anyone actually look anything up on Yahoo anymore? It’s basically become an email provider (which Google STILL does better with G-Mail) and email listserv. Almost all of their other content is provided better by Google (maps, newsgroups, search engine, etc.).
Yahoo! still has a significant share of the online ad market, with Microsoft a distant third. The combined entity wouldn’t quite beat Google, but it’d be much closer to being a contender.
Word has it that the folks at Yahoo (at least the grunt-types) are all planning on bailing out of Yahoo if MS does take them over, so the brain drain would be coonsiderable (many Yahoo employees apparently quit MS years ago and have no desire to be back under MS’s thumb).
Industry wonks describe the potential merger as one of those things which might look good on paper, but when you get out in the real world, you quickly see that you’ll end up with a very messy combination.
I use Yahoo as a portal because I have customized MyYahoo to display all the things I am interested in: news, sports, finance, weather, travel. I could do that with Google I suppose, but why bother when I have what I need now, and it is a familiar interface. I have a Yahoo email address I have used for 11 years. I use Google as well, but not as a portal.
Realistically, though, whether the Yahoo managers and executives want Microsoft to take over their baby is irrelevant. Their first responsibility is to get the most money for the shareholders. So presumably they feel that they can either sell the company to someone else for more than the $33 a share Microsoft offered or they can remain independent but manage things better so that the market price rises above that. I doubt that they can do either.
Where did this info come from? I’m not a huge MS fan re their predatory attitudes but *working * for MS is generally considered to be a very desirable (and generally well paid) position among tech types. I never heard of any substantial group of MS employees leaving because they felt they were being oppressed in some fashion.
MS offered $33/share. Yahoo! wanted $37/share. I have no idea which one is closer to a fair deal but if MS would have accepted $37, the deal would be done.
On January 30, Yahoo closed at $19.05 a share after announcing poor quarterly results. On January 31, Microsoft offered $31 a share. The stock has since climbed, but what will happen now that Microsoft’s offer is off the table? Will the Yahoo board be able to improve the stock more than Microsoft was offering? That’s the speculation.
As dewey has pointed out, this just re-poses my question. Why would they NOT accept $33 a share when the company’s share price history clearly indicates it’s worst a lot less than that?
Obviously, they could have said “We want more,” and did. The question I was posing was why they would ask for so much more and torpedo a deal that already paid them vastly more than Yahoo! is worth. Microsoft was offering a sum that was already vastly more than anyone else in the world, save apparently Yahoo themselves, thinks Yahoo is worth. Unless Yahoo has some magical technology or market innovation we don’t know about, it would certainly appear that they just threw away billions of dollars.
So I was curious as to why. I don’t know enough about the two companies to know; it’s just that according to the available evidence, this decision didn’t make fiscal sense.
Who said anything about it being a “group”? You’ve got the ordinary turnover, plus the whole “permatemp” issue which will give you a number of ex-employees. I’m getting that info, however, from comments made by folks on This Week in Tech.
Read Mini-Microsoft sometime, or even Mary Jo Foley’s columns. Microsoft may have been THE place to be in the 90s, but now it’s a rat’s nest of endless, self-serving middle management, aggrieved programmers, an outdated corporate culture and a project management process completely unsuited to shipping large-scale projects on time and of acceptable quality. With its failed digital music strategy, an operating system most of its customers fear like the plague, and innumerable other failed or stalled initiatives, MS’ reputation among the tech-savvy has taken a severe nosedive, and lot of their best and brightest have jumped ship for Yahoo, Google, Apple or their own startups.
I work in the Valley, and I don’t know anyone who wishes they were working for Microsoft today. When they started, sure, especially considering how much money you would have made. Now their reputation is for buggy, insecure and late software, that survives only because it sells to clueless IT managers afraid to move to Linux. I’m not saying that it is true, but MS doesn’t have a great reputation.
Yahoo at one time used Google to power its results.
That is why Google dropped from a 75% share to just over 50% share of online searches.
Currently
Google commands around 55%
Yahoo 30%
MSN 11%
Ask 1%
Currently those mentioned plus Gigablast are the only search engines that spider the web themselves. Other search engines like AltaVista use one of the others to power their results.
MSN larges results often result from the fact people type search words into the URL bar and Windows defaults to the MSN search for things like that.
MSN wanted to buy Yahoo to increase it’s market share.
Actually MSN’s new search algorithm IS better than Google. I have found way too many spam sites and duplicate sites in Google despite Google’s claim not to allow this. Obviously answers.com mirrors the Wikipedia and both often come up in the top 5.
MSN and Yahoo are much better for getting your site listed faster so if you’re looking for newer pages you’re better off going there.
When you look potential buyers you must look long term, look what AOL did to Time Warner. Also Yahoo and Google, unlike MSN are just ideas.
All Google has is an algorithm, look at it like this if Ford Motors goes under they would at least have scrap they could sell for scrap metal. But Google only has an idea, so it’s price is based solely on the public’s acceptance.
Online advertising is inflated and most companies take a long time to realize this. As of currently Amazon and eBay have a sell through rate of 30% and 21% respectively and they tower above the others. Most successful click through programs are measured in tenths of one percent, according to Google.