Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 7th Nov 2008 09:25 UTC, submitted by Oh! Ballmer
Steve Ballmer said at an economic forum in Sydney today that any new Yahoo deal was totally of the cards, despite Yahoo's share price being less than half Microsoft's initial offer. At same time, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang said that "I believe the best thing for Microsoft to do is to buy Yahoo." Google pulled out of its deal with Yahoo! earlier this week.
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Member since:
2005-07-17
Microsoft got what they really wanted, a competitor removed from the market.
They just didn't want Google to have Yahoo and started enough of a fuss with government that Google might becoming an evil monopoly (They said, trust us, we know something about evil monopolies and this is what we would do if we were Google.)
Now Google has pulled out because they don't want to be tied down into months of anti-trust litigation over a relatively trivial (dollar wise) deal. Yahoo's employees are demoralized, their CEO looks stupid, their customers are jittery... Microsoft doesn't even have to get any customers from them or release new products now, just sit back and wait for Yahoo to implode then scavenge the carcass.
Way to go DOJ & FTC... in the meantime lets allow every other ACTUAL monopoly like Satellite Radio or Cellphones to get mopped up to be bigger than ever.
Maybe Apple or AT&T might be interested? Apple doesn't really want to run websites, but having a big name would be cool.. if only to get rid of that .Mac/MobileMe junk... AT&T could just buy the thing they bundle it all the time, and again run their services from a public site rather than keeping their own. Perhaps throw in AOL as a brand and they'd be huge hosts of "little people" video, pictures, community groups, etc.