If you thought things were over between Microsoft and Yahoo!, you ain't seen nothing yet. Because now it's really, officially, super duper over. Yahoo! issued a press releases this afternoon making it clear that that not only will Microsoft not be purchasing all of Yahoo!, but Yahoo! won't be selling Microsoft even a part of its business. Not its search engine; not its email service; not even the key to replace the toilet paper and paper towels in the company restrooms (although honestly, we're not sure that was ever on the table).
According to the Yahoo! press release, Yahoo! board members decided that it would not be in the company's best interest to sell its search business. Microsoft, on the other hand, released a statement saying that such a partnership would have provided value for Yahoo! shareholders while ensuring a competitive marketplace.
Oh, and while Microsoft has withdrawn its proposal to buy all of Yahoo!, if Yahoo! decides to change its mind and come crawling back, Microsoft says its offer to buy just the search engine "remains available for discussion." So umm, yeah, maybe it's not really over yet.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water (or at least use Flickr without fear that Microsoft would start requiring WGA validation), Microsoft released a statement saying it's not quite done with this whole Yahoo! thing yet. No, the company isn't putting another bid on the table for an outright acquisition of Yahoo!, but Microsoft isn't ruling that out either.
In a nutshell, Microsoft wants to make it clear that the company plans to expand its advertising and service businesses. And to that end, Microsoft has proposed some sort of an arrangement or partnership with Yahoo! Or maybe Microsoft wants to buy some, but not all of the search portal's properties. The statement doesn't really make it clear what Microsoft's after at this point.
A number of Yahoo! shareholders have expressed their disappointment with the way the Microsoft negotiations were handled (and the subsequent drop in stock price). So we could certainly see why Yahoo!'s leadership might be interested in some sort of a deal which could provide value for both companies, and more importantly keep shareholders from demanding Jerry Yang's head on a platter.
Condé Nast Publications (which owns Wired, Wired.com, and a whole bunch of major magazines) has agreed to purchase Ars Technica for an undisclosed sum.
According to TechCrunch, Ars will be placed under the Wired Digital umbrella under CondéNet, which was made whole with the 2006 acquisition of Wired.com, and may be combined with Wired and Wired.com. The sale will be announced some time in the next week, Mashable has confirmed.
Ars looks to be a good fit for Wired and Wired.com, especially given the similar styles of tech reporting available on on both networks. Both include traditional professional feature style reporting on technology and trends. Wired will benefit from the addition of the new writing staff and Ars will gain a new outlet from its reporting. We wouldn't be surprised to see their work appearing in other publications across the Condé Nast house. The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and even GQ (all Condé Nast publications) could stand to benefit from Gear and Gadgets and some of the other ongoing reporting from Ars Technica.
With all the talk of Microsoft's bid for Yahoo! leading nowhere, there's one important thing to keep in mind: Yahoo! never said it was looking for a buyer. Microsoft's takeover offer never quite got "hostile," but it was unsolicted nonetheless. So now that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has decided to take his ball and go home, we probably shouldn't be surprised that Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang released a statement saying "With the distraction of Microsoft's unsolicited proposal now behind us, we will be able to focus all of our energies" on other things, you know, like making the company as valuable as Yang and the shareholders told Microsoft it already is.
Kara Swisher at All Things Digital has written an interesting article choc full of information from those close to the negotiations. In a nutshell, she says that Yang was originally holding out for Microsoft to offer $40 a share, which was a good $10 or $11 higher than the value of the offer this week. Ballmer was reportedly willing to go as high as $33, while Yang was willing to come down to $37. But once Yang said that Yahoo! would respond to any proxy fight initiated by Microsoft by expanding its partnership with Google, things seemed to fall apart.
It's not clear whether Yahoo! will continue to seek more deals with companies like Google and AOL now that the Microsoft deal is no more. But this raises an interesting question: were Yang and company protecting their brand and their shareholders, or was this a dumb move from a company that's not as relevant as it once was?
OK, this is just getting silly. At this point, Microsoft has made its offer to purchase Yahoo!, been rejected, set a date in the sand, after which Microsoft would try to oust Yahoo!'s board of directors, and then let that date come and go without taking any action. And after all the tough talk, now it looks like Microsoft is finally starting to consider raising its asking price.
The problem is that Microsoft is thinking $32 or $33, which would be a nice boost from its current bid valued at $29.06 a share, while some Yahoo! shareholders are apparently holding out for $35 or more a share.
If this keeps up, we kind of expect Steve Ballmer to start shooting sptiballs at Yahoo! board members and shareholders, pulling their hair, and then threatening to take the kickball home with him so they can't play the game anymore. And then Microsoft will wind up paying $45 a share.
Yahoo! seems to have come up with the ultimate response to Microsoft's heavy-handed attempts to purchase the internet portal. The Wall Street Journal reports that Yahoo! is in talks with Download Squad's parent company AOL over plans to merge the two companies' internet operations.
If the deal goes through, the two companies would combine their web and internet based services. AOL's old school ISP services would not be part of the deal, which would value AOL at $10 billion. Yahoo! would reportedly use some of the revenue from a merger with Time Warner/AOL to buy back a whole bunch of stock which woudl help the company fend off any further unwanted advances from Microsoft.
The upshot of a possible partnership or merger is that people will stop picking on AOL for copying Yahoo!'s homepage design. The downside is that a merged company could conceivably be called AOwho? OK, probably not. We for one welcome our new Yahoo! overlords anyway.
Oh, Microsoft, Yahoo!, when are you going to stop fighting and realize that you're in love with each other? Yahoo!'s board of directors has responded to a letter from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer demanding action within 3 weeks. In a nutshell, Ballmer told Yahoo! that if the company didn't accept Microsoft's buyout offer, Microsoft would lower its bid and try to replace the Yahoo! Board. So what does Yahoo!'s current board have to say?
I mean seriously, $31 per share? What's up with that. And have we mentioned that your stock is dropping, so your offer is worth less today then when you made the offer?
We keep launching new products like a new advertising platform that add value to our brand. And you're trying to buy us for $31 per share? Hmph.
You think you're the only one interested in taking us to the prom? We've got lots of suitors. Really.
Don't bully us.
All of which is to say that Yahoo! has not closed the door on a possible merger with Microsoft. But Microsoft's either going to have to follow through on Ballmer's threat to wage a proxy battle or raise its asking price.
OK, we know it's a long shot, but wouldn't it be great if Microsoft succeeded in its bid to buy Yahoo! and then renamed the company Microhoo? Because when you type "Microhoo" into Yahoo!'s search engine right now, one of the suggestions is "Microhoods." And given Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's recent letter to the Yahoo! Board, that seems like as accurate a description as any.
Essentially, Ballmer told the board that they've got 3 weeks to accept Microsoft's offer, currently valued at $42 billion in cash and stocks. If the board refuses, Microsoft will take the offer directly to Yahoo!'s shareholders and nominate a slate of board members to replace the current board.
The original offer was 62% higher than Yahoo!'s closing share price on January 31, one day before the offer was made. Ballmer says the goal was to facilitate a "speedy and ultimately friendly transaction." Since that hasn't happened, Ballmer indicates Microsoft might be willing to get a little less friendly, and suggests that Microsoft would drop its offer price if the company has to resort to a proxy contest.
As expected, Yahoo! has rejected Microsoft's bid to take over the web portal and its network of services. Microsoft had been offering $44.6 billion for Yahoo!, which the Yahoo! board claims undervalues the company. Microsoft has a few options available. The company could raise its bid price, or it could try to circumvent the board's decision by taking the offer directly to the shareholders.
Meanwhile, Yahoo! is "evaluating all of its strategic options." The rumor du jour is that Yahoo! is in talks with this blog's parent company, AOL. The move makes some sense, as AOL has been remodeling itself in recent years as a company focused on online services and advertising, rather than a dialup and broadband service provider. Yahoo! would bring a lot of expertise to the table, while the two companies would be well positions to compete with the other giants in online software, Google and Microsoft.
Techcrunch is reporting this morning that real estate sales company Time Lending California has acquired social networking site BOOMj.com. Time Lending admits that it deals in "direct marketing" and BOOMj.com is a site aimed at the Baby Boomer (and older) generation. Let's connect the dots, shall we?
Since it's not likely that social networking is part of Time Lending's business model, what other reason could they have for buying BOOMj? An opt-in mailing list full of sitting ducks, perhaps? According to a BOOMj.com press release, the merger (or acquisition, depending on which section of the release you read) will provide "shareholder value," give the company "access to capital markets," and "enhance (their) visibility and market awareness."
The internet is starting to look like a Highlander movie. In the end, there can be only one company. And that company will have untold power over all the web.
Today's big news is that Microsoft and Google are reportedly in a bidding war for a minority stake in Facebook. Sure, neither is planning on buying the site outright, but the move could help Microsoft bolster its online business or help Google expand its social network offerings.
Apparently Microsoft is willing to pay $300 to $500 million for a 5% stake in Facebook. That would give Facebook a $10 billion valuation, which is a bit silly if you ask us. Sure, the site is the hottest thing since we burned our hands on the oven the other day, but Facebook is just starting to turn out revenue. And the social networking space if fickle. We remember a time not so long ago when people couldn't stop talking about how cool Friendster was.
Google is also interested in buying a stake in Facebook, although it seems nobody's leaked exactly how much money Google is willing to spend. Oh yeah, and Facebook is getting greedy. Part of the reason we're still talking about negotiations and not a deal is because Facebook is holding out for a higher valuation, possibly as high as $15 billion, which if our math is correct would mean Microsoft or Google would have to pay $750 million for a 5% stake.
There's been persistent rumours for as long as we can remember about Facebook being the object of Yahoo!'s desire, with founder Mark Zuckerberg reportedly turning down offers in the region of $2 BILLION. Yes, two billion dollars. However Microsoft, apparently keen to make inroads with their some-what floundering Windows Live initiatives, is rumoured to be wanting Facebook, and badly. So badly that the price being whispered is around three times the price Yahoo offered: a whopping $6 billion dollars.
As InsideMicrosoft mentions, it makes a lot of sense for Microsoft to be interested in Facebook, however they also fail to mention one other small thing that this might, just might, be about: adverts. Facebook's audience is vast - it's not just University students using Facebook - and the Facebook site would provide an easy way to expand Microsoft's Advertising network onto one of the most popular sites on the web. No doubt it would please a lot of Microsoft Advertising folks to have the massive Facebook network on their books, providing them with an inroad into Google's dominance in web advertising, not to mention a huge exclusive audience for Microsoft to offer advertisers.
As ever, this is all rumours but one thing to note is that, if the Microsoft warchest is opened to buy Facebook, the deal will make a large dent on Microsoft's cash reserves, if these April 2007 figures are anything to go by.
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp picked up MySpace in 2005 for $580 million. Now the company is trying to offer MySpace, and possibly some other properties like IGN, to Yahoo! in exchange for a quarter stake in the portal. After the merger, that 25% stake could be worth more than $12 billion.
Yahoo! is definitely interested in breaking into the social networking game. The company made a failed $1 billion dollar bid for Facebook last year. It'll be interesting to see how much MySpace, a site that's been losing ground to Facebook in recent months, is worth to Yahoo!
According to the press release, the acquisition gives eBay exposure to StumbleUpon's growing community of over 2 million users. Still seems like an awkward match to us. In recent years, eBay purchased PayPal, but that was a no-brainer, and Skype, which has an obvious commercial aspect.
The company hardly needed StumbleUpon to build its brand recognition. And if they just start injecting eBay auctions willy nilly into stumble results, they'll pretty much break the community they bought as members begin to evacuate the spam-laden sinking ship. Still, a separate "stumble to find books, computer parts, or hummels" section could make a lot of sense.
eBay senior director Michael Buhr assumes the post of general manager of StumbleUpon, while StumbleUpon's current management team remains in place.
A few weeks ago we told you that eBay was in talks to buy StumbleUpon. And then nothing happened for a while. Well, stuff happened, but the biggest announcement involving eBay was probably the new Firefox Companion for eBay.
Now the Wall Street Journal reports that the talks are on, and that auction company could be prepared to shell out $75 million for the social web discovery service. There's no final agreement on the table yet, and the deal could still fall through.
As Duncan Riley at TechCrunch points out, this an interesting move for eBay. The company has already purchased Paypal and Skype, but those are both companies that can be integrated into an online auction service. StumbleUpon lets users discover new websites by clicking a Stumble! button on their browser toolbar. Unless eBay wants a new way for users to find random junk for sale (which you can already do pretty easily), this seems like a departure from eBay's usual offerings.
