Microsoft has offered to buy the search engine company Yahoo for $44.6bn in cash and shares.
The offer, contained in a letter to Yahoo's board, is 62% above Yahoo's closing share price on Thursday.
Yahoo cut its revenue forecasts earlier this week and said it would have to spend an additional $300m this year trying to revive the company.
It has been struggling in recent years to compete with Google, which has also been a competitor to Microsoft.
If you would've asked me how I felt about this a couple years ago, I would've jumped on the anti-MS bandwagon with everyone else and worried that Microsoft would ruin Yahoo and her spin-offs, but today, Yahoo is the company that needs to be saved - and why not by Microsoft?
I mean, they ruined Flickr by forcing everyone to get barcodes Yahoo IDs, no one cares about all of their other web properties since they suck the big one even more, and their reputation isn't quite what it used to be either.
Microsoft, on the other hand, isn't the monolithic corporate asshole they used to be [portrayed as]. They do more Good Things(tm) around the world than Yahoo, Google, Apple, and Sony put together - both on and off the web - and their privacy policy, a topic near and dear to my heart, is far better than any of the aforementioned companies as well.
And that's just the philosophical side. Practically, they've been doing some great work too. They make interfaces; it's what Microsoft does, and they do it well. Look at the Xbox 360; it has the best-looking, most usable interface of any of the current gaming consoles. Sony's is a cubist's wet dream but is clunky and unmanageable, and Nintendo's is a rip-off of Apple circa 2001. Vista sells many times more copies than OS X not only because more computers run it, or because of established base, but because it's a better out-of-the-box user experience than OS X (or, yes, Linux). I'm a die-hard Linux user, but even I will admit that it does take some tweaking and learning to get a better user experience than either OS X or Vista.
From that angle, what Microsoft could do to turn around Yahoo's bleak outlook is an interesting question indeed.
This Linux using, open-source-preaching, Drupal-building commie bastard sees Microsoft as one of the most important pieces of building a better, free-er, open Internet.
Got me wondering if I had landed on a fake Stevo's page!!!
Got me wondering if I had landed on a fake Stevo's page!!! :0O
I did expect you to and most certainly did not expect you to close your post with
I must say I've pondered and came to a similar conclusion.
As I have just recently been introduced to the various "autoroutes" that Information Technology offers nowadays it was hard at first to encompass the many dimensions and freedom that Open Source has to offer. Let alone the possibilities of tweaking and customization. But being a medium low "tech savvy gal" I got lost and am still just trying to keep my head above water in these oceans.
Nevertheless, I bring another supporting argument based on personal experience. Being a translator by profession, I use Microsoft Suites of Applications on a very daily basis and (was) am forced to "stick" to the Unicode pretty closely in order to satisfy the mass. Our clients very often demand to have the files in the exact format they've sent it. Our tools to translate, review and proof are solely developped for PC. In short we had to use technology that was like a "prison". Until recently....
I was just introduced to Gobby, a is a free software collaborative real-time editor available on Windows and Unix-like platforms, that completely revolutionaizes the way we can work in my field. As any unilingual content manager would know, versions, proofs and reproofs can be quite a hassle, hair pulling, time consuming job. Now as a multilingual translator, that headache is multiplied by the number of target languages that we carry, let alone some regional settings and tweakings that also need to be addressed. Not only does every change need to be tracked, it must be "shadowed" in every corresponding language throughout the material produced. All... within an insanely short about of time (as any translator, copy editor will tell you... clients always underappreciate the time it takes and very often even FORGET about the need to translate, until they are at the printing and releasing stage and go...OUPS!!!)
Now, that being said, this new technology CHANGES all that by allowing editors and translators to work in real-time within the same document!!! True enough, users have to be a little knowledgeable and it only allows to maximize some aspect of our job. But, as I am more involved in non-profit initiatives, the fact that this enables free, quick solutions to work in synergy is a great plus. Some < a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_localization">localization expert I know also have been using this technology and they had been raving about it. But since none had even bothered to mention it was not >solely> addressed to programmers... never did we pick up on the uses we can have for it, as simple as collaboratively writting a verbatim while in a group meeting!
Anyhow, it is nice to see that some Open Source technology is now making its way in the mainstream world, as Microsoft decides to use wiki based collaborative technology also. The biggest news yet, is that well established conservative clients are finally considering the implementation of such technologies and will now allow us providers to join the 21st century.
P.S. Did I mention I still do use Yahoo for emailing... and have been annoyed with the degradation of services they provide (always changing things for no reason and forcing it on us...).
Anyways... better late then never I guess!
Well that's the thing - while I'm a huge believer in the power
Well that's the thing - while I'm a huge believer in the power of Open Source, I also feel that there's a place for commercial software as well. I don't think that all software should be open-source.
I use Skype, Bibble, and Adobe Photoshop CS2 (all on Linux), as well as other commericial software on my Windows box. I buy lots of PC and console games (all commercial software, and all of high quality). I sometimes use closed, proprietary social networks when they're useful to me, like last.fm or LinkedIn. It's just that the vast majority of software I use is free / open source - not only because it's free (I can afford to buy all the tools I need) or only because of philosophical reasons (I'm a pragmatist when it comes to "getting things done", and as companies go, Microsoft is one of the ones I feel least bad giving my money to), but just because it's better, higher-quality, more flexible software than the commercial alternatives. The Ubuntu OS helps me get more work done than I was able to on OS X or Windows. OpenOffice has options that I can customize to give me a better experience than iWork or MS Office. And on and on. I'll use whatever software works best to do my work - it's just that today, the software that works best is, 90% of the time, already open source. It's a good time to be a web professional.
ok, let add my two cents, on
ok, let add my two cents, on why I'm still here. originally came from the facebook ad the Times ran, haven't read it but got caught up here.. having evangelized M$ for many years based on Bill's "tool" concept, I believe that their Vista product is a Millennium clone. a transposition between a suckier system and a mega-monopoly looking for no insides and no outsides to dispersement of information hence DRM.
They aren't protecting Hollywood they just wished they invented iTunes is all, hell they did with xbox live! so whats the issue? $300 a copy for an OS thats slow, tedious, and a crappy clone of OSX $800 for office thats just plain stupid. Stupid is as stupid does eh?
I'm just not into M$ anymore. meddling into my affairs like: facebook, Google, binding beacons and the proliferation of crapmail yeah,next they'll charge us for mail..... there's a place for them in the giant scheme of things but I'm no longer going to beta testing for them for free period. and when they charge me for something. I expect it to be fair! not over a thousand bucks either! Hell! the hardware is cheaper..UBUNTU is free and with the internet I can do everything else. s'cuse my French but, fuck M$. When they get rid of Balmer and bring back a kindler gentler version of Bill, I might reconsider but I'm turning the tidal wave on their products over to OPEN-SOURCE.
RANT off...
Panazonie, MS is no saint, I
Panazonie,
MS is no saint, I agree with you. Pragmatically, though, they're not that bad - especially when you stack them up next to the like of Apple, Google, Facebook and Yahoo.
Ubuntu is awesome. It really is that distro that gives Linux a place in the spotlight.
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