matgb | Microsoft attempts to buy Yahoo! and Google reacts

* cheers google on *

I just don't get this move. Well, I mean, I do - it makes economic sense and follows a clear MS pattern of buying its way into good positions - but what I don't get is why Microsoft is so damn interested in the internet.

Thing is, they've never 'got' the internet. Rather than playing the good role of operating system and software company, they've got confused and starting caring about what people do once they've bought said OS and software. Again, I could see the need for this if a company was floundering looking to diversify, but clearly Microsoft is not that company. Anyway, if it really wanted to branch out it would be far better concentrating on its core business first - and that's why Windows Mobile and Media Centre products are doing quite well.

Google - well Google does search results and advertising. It's really not the same business at all. Yes MS has Hotmail and MSN and similar, but I've never seen them as major parts of the Microsoft plan. Even Internet Explorer doesn't really matter in the big scheme of things, because it's not a reason why people spend money - and that's what really matters surely?

If Microsoft is really worried about Google, it should be because of Android (which will compete with Windows Mobile) and, if it ever happens, Google's office suite and/or online DTP tools (which will obviously compete with Office). Yahoo aint these, so again, I just don't get the big deal.

And finally, nothing says pointless like buying a company that's sinking faster than holed ocean liner. Yahoo is so last century it hurts, and buying into that only goes to show again that Microsoft really doesn't get the internet thing one little bit.

So other than making a big slash in a dodgy market, anyone got any idea why MS thinks it's a good idea? Google must be laughing their asses off at the money that's proposed to be wasted...

I concur, for the most part. The thing is, while the headline Yahoo! product might not be great, scratch the surface, their email gets more users than Hotmail and Gmail combined (apparently), and then there's things like their mail server (Zimbra?).

What is confusing and slightly bothering is stuff like Yahoo!'s support for FOSS stuff—the guy who created PHP does his day job for them, for example. Google's already started headhunting.

I suspect they're after market share (which Yahoo has) and some of the innovative edge on the non-headline products. Quite frankly, Google Docs, Gmail et al should scare any monopoly position—neither is there (yet), but both have potential.

The /. article has some comments worht reading in amongst the usual dross:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/03/1248226&from=rss

Yahoo, of course, just announced major support for OpenID. I wonder if their support for open standards triggered something...

Microsoft have already said they'll support OpenID in some way, as essentially it's a better replacement for their failed Passport system, so I doubt that's a direct effect. But as Paul says in the comment below, it's possible that the MS glacier is moving in the right direction, but with dodgy policies still happening because they're too big to all get the clue at once.

Yahoo! own lots of stuff that's good but not obviously profitable like del.icio.us (presumably ctrl-alt-del.icio.us post merger). And indeed, their user count doesn't seem to be helping their share price.

Also, Yahoo! have tie-ups with Apple - the Stocks and Weather apps on the iPhone/touch are powered by Yahoo! (and are both shite). But of course Apple stores sell MS Office For Mac, so it's not like MS are purely about Windows.

Expanding Microsoft's support for open source stuff is possibly a good counter-argument to any regulatory concerns about Windows.

I dunno. I get the feeling Microsoft isn't the company it was 10 years ago, and this seems a good chance to prove it.

presumably ctrl-alt-del.icio.us post merger

That was bad. That was REALLY bad.

But yeah, there's hope that MS might be moving the right way, either through seeing the light or customer demand, matters not which really. It's just the concerns over their stuff which I do use, like delicious—MS really messed up Hotmail, and while they may have learnt, can they really afford to have major services run on competing OS server stuff?

Microsoft see Google as being out to kill them. So Microsoft is damn well going to kill Google first, whatever it takes.

Well, Steve Ballmer's been trying to Fucking Kill Google for quite a while now...

Hoo yeah, that be fightin' talk.

True, of course.

No, it doesn't sound like they're too pleased by this development, does it?

When I first heard it, I thought "yahoo? who uses that search engine?" but then you mentioned the mail and it became clear.
Microsoft must be stopped!

Yahoo is as much about search as Google is these days. I have a Gmail account, I use Google Calender and Docs, I watch YouTube, friends use Picasa and I sometimes use Blogspot. All Google products, all basically run as locations to put adverts on.

Blogspot/Blogger basically works the same way as LJ but without privacy or friends page. But it has a one-click "put adverts here" trick, and you get the ad revenue. Except of course if you use Google ads, which most do, they make money as well.

Yahoo does search, but also mail, Flickr, del.icio.us and a bunch of other products that you might not associate with them directly. And behind the scenes they have a bunch of business aimed products, software and services that make them cash that we don't see. One of those is the main competition for Microsoft's Exchange business email system, which might be interesting.

TBH, I think MS, Google and Yahoo are all mid-term doomed anyway, Google has the best legs, but Google was a small start up no one had really heard of ten years ago. The replacement companies are out there now, we may or may not already be using them...

I'll stop rambling now.

But advertising revenue is down at the minute, and will be one of the first things to go should we fall into recession (cf Google's lower than expected profits released a day or two ago.) Also, there's a level of saturation online ad-wise that means that as people get more fed up of adverts and more tech-savvy, those adverts will get blocked and ignored a whole lot more. Not that advertising companies won't come up with other ways of getting their message across, but a business that focuses solely on making money through having ad space might start to feel the pinch.

Frankly, we're still not in a position where a economy 2.0 non-bricks and mortar company can ever be considered 'not-doomed'. MS at least has the advantage that it has physical product that still has massive monopoly on the market. What we haven't seen in the last 25 years is a viable challenger to MS software dominance (And that's from a committed Linux user), whereas Google was virtually unheard of ten years ago and may well be unheard of again in another ten years.

Don't expect MS to die anytime soon - they're still here after the paradigm shift that was the boom of home computing, so they've already shown they can adapt to a new model of working. Maybe we don't even know what the next one is, but the biggest company on the planet isn't going to disappear overnight regardless what happens.

On the ad front—I think that's why they're pushing so heavily into SAS with Docs, domain hosting, etc. They have the server capacity and the backups to pretty much guarantee 100% uptime. If I were setting up a small business now, I'd consider hosted Docs and Gmail, both of which you can pay for a version that's got your branding on. Theyr'e not there yet for a company the size of yours to consider, but in a few years? Maybe.

And I'm really hopefull that things like the EEE will help Linux take off (finally), and a fair few Vendors are seeing where the market is moving, especially with the Vista mess.

MS'll still be about, but dominant market leader? Possibly.

Yeah, the domain stuff is great - I've got it for ducker.org.uk and the email is 100% reliable.

Oh, and since getting an Eee and discovering that Linux is now so usable I've installed a VM onto a USB key with Ubuntu on it, set up Firefox, and now have the environment I want wherever I go!

This is because you are Teh Ubergeek.

I might have to give both a go at somepoint I guess, I tried Ubuntu at either 5.* or 6.*, but messed up the install and lost a partition, as my desktop is now unused it's probably time to back everything up and go again...

So not an ubergeek. I know people that actually _like_ Linux. I was only doing it to avoid paying license costs for Windows :->

And I didn't install it onto a partition on my PC. In fact I didn't install it at all. I went to Moka5.com, installed their software, said "A Ubuntu VM please" and 20 minutes later was booted to a desktop. No hassle required :->

Microsoft attempts to buy Yahoo! and Google reacts

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