Why does M$ want to buy Yahoo so bad? Microsoft usually isn't a company to try hostile takeovers, but it seems they really want to buy Yahoo! this time. What would they do, close it down? I got some Yahoo email addresses. Would they end up becoming Hotmail addresses? What exactly would they gain from this acquisition?
Go to http://www.msn.com/ Chances are the page won't look very familiar, and that's a common thing because despite throwing lots of money and resources at it to date Microsoft has not had not success trying to establish a web presence. Even Hotmail was an acquisition of another company after Microsofts own email service didn't set the world on fire. Most people will never visit MSN, and it doesn't have a brand presence in peoples minds. Yahoo does, lots of people use email there, read the news there, trust the Yahoo kids content to be safe for their children. Microsoft wants that, it wants people to voluntarily and willingly have a Microsoft site as the first thing they think of when they go onto the internet. If Microsoft is successful in their bid I wouldn't be too worried about any of the existing Yahoo content, at least not for the next couple of years. They want people to keep using it and so like they did with Hotmail they will likely do nothing at first except to add a couple of Microsoft logos onto the pages. The second big motivation for Microsoft is that they seem to be terrified of Google.
I don't know anything that any execs do but I think things are going to get mighty strange before they are resolved. source I welcome my new Yahoo overlords.
Isn't Yahoo in bed with AT&T? I don't know about elsewhere in the country, but in my area if you're an SBC/AT&T DSL customer, you're automatically issued a yahoo email address as your primary. An email addy given to you by your ISP may not be any big deal for 'net savvy customers, but for all of those people for whom internet usage is in the same league with programming your VCR, that email is all they're ever going to know. So...Microsoft picks up Yahoo, and suddenly, MS is on the home page of how many hundreds of thousands of users? Moreover, because it's likely that most of those users will skew into the juicy over-50-with-lots-of-disposable-income demographic, maybe that would make Yahoo a cherry for Microsoft. I do a little bit of good samaritan work on computers in our neighborhood, mostly for older folks who're still intimidated by their machines but desperately want to stay connected for pictures of the grandkids and whatnot. The site that pops up on their computers at browser-start is Yahoo, not Google. I'm not entirely sure I understand what drives the corporate-tech machine, but is something like that likely to make Yahoo a good deal for Microsoft?
I'm not even sure why Yahoo is looking. They're not making a ton of money by tech industry standards but their profitability is growing very nicely every year.
Yahoo isn't looking - M$ is talking about buying them up outright, one of the reasons Time Warner is talking about spinning AOL out under them - so they either become less attractive to M$ or to inflate the stock price so M$ decides to walk for financial reasons. Plus Time Warner gets rid of AOL which I've never thought they really cared about anyway.
Maybe, but Microsoft have made their intentions very clear and if they don't appear to be looking for the best deal there is a good chance lots of their shareholders could be tempted by offers from Microsoft.
I think the original article said Microsoft was offering the board quite a bit more per share than what the company was worth on the open market. This probably is BECAUSE Yahoo! is still making a profit. Maybe M$ got wind that one or more of the shareholders wanted out, and decided to make a big push?
