Archive for the ‘YAHOO’ Category
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Three tech giants — Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Yahoo — said on Tuesday they are teaming up on a research project to help turn Web services into reliable, everyday utilities.
The companies are joining forces with academic researchers in Asia, Europe and the United States to create an experimental network that lets researchers test “cloud-computing” projects — Web-wide services that can reach billions of users at once.
Their goal is to promote open collaboration among industry, academic and government researchers by removing financial and logistical barriers to working on hugely computer-intensive, Internet-wide projects.
Founding members of the consortium said they aim to create a level playing field for individual researchers and organizations of all sizes to conduct research on software, network management and the hardware needed to deliver Web-wide services as billions of computer and phone users come online.
“No one institution or company is going to figure this out,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, the head of Yahoo Research who is also a consulting professor of computer science at nearby Stanford University.
Cloud computing has become the industry’s biggest buzzword. It is a catch-all term to describe how Internet-connected hardware and software once delivered as discreet products can be managed as Web-based, utility-like services.
“Potentially the entire planet will come to rely on this, like electricity,” Raghavan said, referring to the push to make everything from daily communications to shopping to entertainment into always-available, on-demand Web services.
“We are all trying to move from the horse driving the wagon to a million ants driving the wagon,” Raghavan said of the need to let computers manage millions of small jobs, adding that the available capacity on the Web would vary widely. “The challenge can be a billion ants one day and a million ants the next.” Continued…
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Regulators in the US are being urged to investigate any potential online advertising and search partnership between Google and Yahoo.
The call by a coalition of 16 American civil rights and rural advocacy bodies comes despite the fact no firm deal has actually been announced.
“We all suffer in such mega mergers,” Gary Flowers of the Black Leadership Forum told BBC News.
The justice department is examining a trial the companies did in April.
It has been widely reported that it is looking into the anti-trust implications of last month’s two-week test.
However, the department says it has no comment on the coalition’s demands because there is no definitive agreement between Yahoo and Google at the moment.
But reports say that the two companies are presently hammering out the intricacies of a future potential advertising and search agreement, and are sharing their plans with antitrust regulators.
At Google’s shareholder meeting on Thursday, Chairman Eric Schmidt said: “If there were a deal [with Yahoo], we would anticipate structuring the deal to address the anti-trust concerns that have been widely discussed.”
‘Never positive’
This assurance is not good enough for the coalition which is made up of the League of Rural Voters, the National Black Chamber of Commerce and the American Agriculture Movement.
It also includes the Black Leadership Forum, an umbrella group of 36 civil rights organisations including the NAACP and the National Urban League.
In a letter to Assistant Attorney General Thoma Barnett, head of the Justice Department’s anti-trust division, the coalition argues that such a deal would give Google almost 90% of the search advertising market and strengthen its influence over internet users’ access to information.
“We face a possible future in which no content could be seamlessly accessed without Google’s permission,” the letter states.
The effect Mr Flowers says of such large partnerships is never positive and would for the black community, as for other communities, “condense competition, increase prices and limit new business opportunity on the internet”.
‘Do no evil’
League of Rural Voters’ executive director Niel Ritchie claims that the do-no-evil mantra may no longer apply in today’s marketplace in which Google’s reach is apparently without bound, touching more and more aspects of our everyday lives.
“We believe the government should give this agreement very careful scrutiny,” he says.
Memo to Jerry Yang: How to make Yahoo great again | Tech news blog – CNET News.com
Posted on: May 6, 2008
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Re: Getting your company back on track
Now that Yahoo appears to be on its own path, it’s time for the company to find in its past what could again make it great.
Contrary to popular opinion, the key to the future isn’t becoming a technological marvel to rival Google. Instead, Yahoo should home in on what it made it special before the dot-com bust: The Yahoooooo! (cowboy twang inserted) of yesteryear.
Yahoo was an Internet media pioneer. The company built or bought every massively popular feature on the Web today–think Broadcast.com (video), Launch (music) and Groups (social networks). It also developed an advertising engine that could deliver on the dream campaign of any marketer with the data to back up that promise. You could argue Yahoo failed to take advantage of many of those assets in recent years, but the shortcomings haven’t been in vision, they’ve been in execution.
So how does Yahoo move forward? It needs to rebrand itself an Internet media company, quit chasing Google on Web search, and get damn good at selling brand advertising to Madison Avenue once again. And it has to get it done before Google figures out how to turn the creative ad process over to robots. Does technology play a role in that future? Of course. But the emphasis should be on technology that makes ad sales possible, not ad sales that make the technology possible.
“Yahoo was basically built for brand advertisers before brand advertisers came online in a big way. Now that they have come online, Yahoo has to have better technology to allow for better targeting and scale,” said Rishad Tobaccowalo, CEO of the futures-consulting company Denuo, a unit of advertising agency holding company Publicis.
Yahoo certainly has been selling technology, but not in the way Tobaccowalo is talking about. Earlier this year, executives started beating the drum about getting back to the technology roots with new products like advanced e-mail, mobile-search technology, and a universal log-on for Yahoo members across services like Flickr, Mail and Address Book.
Those initiatives are worthwhile, but Yahoo should be selling a bigger story to Madison Avenue, particularly as Google tries to build a division for selling brand advertising alongside search. Sure, Yahoo has advertising platforms like Panama, but the company still isn’t reaping the full value of its media network. Quite simply, it isn’t showing the swagger of its younger years among advertisers. (Note: avoid the cockiness that turned some advertisers off in the early years.)
The Associated Press: Yahoo teams with McAfee to offer search results security
Posted on: May 6, 2008
This April 30, 2008 file photo shows an exterior view of Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. Microsoft Corp. has withdrawn its $42.3 billion bid to buy Yahoo Inc., scrapping an attempt to snap up the tarnished Internet icon in hopes of toppling online search and advertising leader Google Inc. The decision to walk away from the deal came Saturday May 3, 2008 after last-ditch efforts to negotiate a mutually acceptable sale price proved unsuccessful. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File)
Yahoo Inc. and McAfee Inc. are joining to offer alerts about potentially dangerous Web sites alongside search results generated at Yahoo.com.
With the new security feature — slated to take effect Tuesday — people who search the Internet using Yahoo will see a red exclamation point and a warning next to links McAfee has identified as serving dangerous downloads or using visitors’ e-mail addresses to send out spam.
Dangerous downloads can include “adware,” which shows unwanted advertisements; “spyware,” which secretly tracks users’ keystrokes and other actions; and other malicious programs that can give criminals control over users’ computers.
Yahoo and McAfee hope the move will quell users’ anxiety about accidentally clicking on malicious links.
“Yahoo users have clearly told us that among the most important concerns for them are all these lurking threats on the Internet,” said Priyank Garg, director of product management for Yahoo’s search division. “They know the damage they can do but they don’t know how to protect themselves.”
Yahoo has decided to simply nuke the worst offenders — sites that attempt “drive-by downloads,” or trying to automatically install malicious code on visitors’ computers by exploiting coding flaws in their Web browsers.
If McAfee has identified a site as having employed such tactics, Yahoo users won’t see the link at all.
“When a user gets a set of search results, there’s really no indication of who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy,” said Tim Dowling, vice president of McAfee’s Web Security Group. “You’re really leaping off a platform of faith that you’re clicking on a site that’s safe and not one that’s bad. And the bad guys really try hard to look good.”
The companies declined to reveal the financial terms of the partnership.
The deal represents the latest attempt by Sunnyvale-based Yahoo to lure more search requests, snap out of its recent financial funk and steal advertising dollars from search leader Google Inc. as it tries to justify its rebuff of Microsoft Corp.’s $47.5 billion takeover bid.
Does Ballmer Need To Go?
Posted on: May 5, 2008
Microsoft’s dramatic decision this weekend to withdraw its offer for Yahoo and not pursue a hostile bid raises a whole host of questions. What happens to Yahoo now? What happens to Microsoft? Or is this just a tactic to drive down the price of Yahoo’s shares so that Microsoft can go hostile with a lower offer? And if the deal really is dead, does Steve Ballmer
need to start looking for a new job?
This last question may not be so hypothetical. Ballmer has been the big driver behind this deal at Microsoft—some would say to the point of obsession. After the disaster that has been Windows Vista (Microsoft’s core product), Ballmer may have realized he needed to redeem himself in the eyes of Microsoft’s board. And the “transformative” deal with Yahoo was the way he was going to do it.
One reading of Ballmer’s obsession with the deal is that he felt his job was on the line if he didn’t get it done. According to one secondhand account that leaked to us yesterday before the deal was called off, over the past week Ballmer increasingly has been “yelling and screaming at employees for almost no reason” and is being “more of a tyrant than usual.” One executive on the Microsoft deal team supposedly made a comment about “not having to worry about Ballmer anymore” if the Yahoo deal fell through. What the exec didn’t know, though, was that Ballmer was in earshot, and he screamed back that the deal would go through and that he wouldn’t let the board “crucify” him.
As things stand, the fact that Ballmer was not able to close the deal could put his job in jeopardy. The big questions are: If he really does walk away, can he put this distraction behind the company? Or is it too late for Ballmer? If Microsoft’s board loses patience with him, it might have to ask Blll Gates to temporarily come back as CEO until it finds a replacement. After all, Ballmer has already made a strong and convincing case for why Microsoft needs Yahoo to make its online and advertising strategy work (it needs the scale of Yahoo’s display and search advertising inventory to compete with Google). It is not clear how it can achieve its objectives on its own or through other acquisitions.
Maybe Ballmer backed down because he realized the deal was becoming too big of a distraction and he didn’t want to drag it out further given Yahoo’s continued resistance. (And save his job in the process). Or perhaps he thinks he can still get it done by making Yahoo’s stock price collapse and come back with a hostile offer. (After all, if you are going to go hostile, you’d want to drive down the stock price of the target company to make your offer look even more attractive to shareholders). We’ll find out later this week.
May 5 (Bloomberg) — Microsoft Corp.‘s decision to drop its pursuit of Yahoo! Inc. increases the pressure on Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer to make his money-losing Internet business succeed against Google Inc.
Ballmer’s bid for Yahoo, the most-visited Web site, signaled that Microsoft was making little progress against Google in Internet search advertising, said Charles Di Bona, a Sanford C. Bernstein analyst. Ballmer withdrew his bid over the weekend after Yahoo refused a sweetened offer of almost $50 billion in stock, leaving investors asking what his online strategy will be.
“They’ve got to come out sooner rather than later with a pretty well articulated vision,” said New York-based Di Bona.
The danger for Microsoft is that Google, owner of the most popular Web search engine and winner of the most online advertising dollars, will expand its dominance while Ballmer plans a new course. Google gained 10 percentage points of market share in Internet queries since June, providing 59.8 percent of the searches done in March, according to researcher ComScore Inc. in Reston, Virginia.
Ballmer and Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft’s Internet unit, met two days ago in Seattle with Yahoo co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo, two people familiar with the negotiations said. Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, the largest software maker, offered to raise its $44.6 billion bid by about $5 billion, to $33 a share. Yang and Filo refused to accept less than $37 a share, the people said.
Microsoft was probably right to walk away because its return from the purchase would have been too small if it had paid more than $35, Di Bona said.
`Square One’
The text promotions that run next to search results account for more than half the $41 billion market for Internet ads. With Yahoo, Microsoft would have tripled its share of U.S. online searches and would have become the biggest seller of graphical- display ads on the Internet.
Smaller acquisitions and investments in technology may not be enough to reverse the fortunes of the Internet unit, which lost $228 million last quarter.
“They’re back to square one,” said Chris Hickey, an analyst at London-based Atlantic Equities who recommends holding Microsoft shares. “The fact that Microsoft wanted to do this deal shows what a difficult position they’re in to start with. This reminded investors of Microsoft’s poor market position and the long-term risk to its business from online competitors.”
Yahoo Shares
Microsoft fell 16 cents to $29.24 May 2 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares have dropped 18 percent this year amid concern that sales of Microsoft’s Windows software, which runs more than 90 percent of the world’s personal computers, are slowing and that buying Yahoo would prove expensive.
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Summary Of Today’s News: Negotiations between Yahoo and Microsoft, widely expected to result in a negotiated deal by Monday, fell apart today. There were a number of statements, all summarized below. Steve Gillmor also convened a special session of the Gillmor Gang at 7 pm to analyze the news – The transcript is still being created, but the recording is now up and live.
Listen to the special Microsoft/Yahoo Gillmor Gang here, with participation from Steve Gillmor, Michael Arrington, Doc Searls, Dan Farber, Dana Gardner, Robert Anderson, and Robert Scoble.
Today’s News (chronological):
- Breaking: Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo Bid; Walks Away From Deal: Microsoft withdraws their February 1 offer, won’t go above $33/share and Yahoo wants $37. The post also includes a letter from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang delivered today.
- Email From Steve Ballmer To All Microsoft Employees: Leaked email from Steve Ballmer to all Microsoft employees that we got our hands on. He explains the deal news to the troops.
- Yahoo’s Tough Week Ahead: Yahoo faces a bleak world next week; look for the stock price to tank. Do they have a backup deal with Google?
- Yahoo Responds: “The distraction of Microsoft’s unsolicited proposal now behind us”: Yahoo issues a press release suggesting relief that the pesky Microsoft distraction is behind them.
- Optionally, skip all the above and just read CNET’s cartoon summary of today’s happenings:
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Microsoft said Saturday that it was abandoning its blockbuster bid to acquire Yahoo after the two companies could not agree on a price.
The breakdown in the talks followed a meeting on Saturday morning in Seattle between Microsoft’s chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, and Yahoo’s chief and co-founder, Jerry Yang, according to a person briefed on the discussions.
At the meeting, which also included Yahoo’s other co-founder, David Filo, and Kevin Johnson of Microsoft, Mr. Ballmer increased Microsoft’s offer to $33 a share, but Mr. Yang said Yahoo would not sell for less than $37 a share, this person said.
Microsoft’s decision to walk away is the latest chapter in a three-month-old standoff that began when Microsoft made an unsolicited offer to acquire Yahoo in an effort to compete more effectively with Google in Web search, advertising and services.
Yahoo rejected Microsoft’s offer repeatedly, saying it undervalued the company. Microsoft at times threatened to lower its offer, originally valued at $44.6 billion, or $31 a share.
In a letter to Mr. Yang that Microsoft released Saturday evening, Mr. Ballmer said that it would not make sense for Microsoft to pursue a lengthy proxy fight. “Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft,” he wrote.
Mr. Ballmer said in a separate statement that Microsoft would continue to pursue its online efforts on its own.
“We have a talented team in place and a compelling plan to grow our business through innovative new services and strategic transactions with other business partners,” he said. “While Yahoo would have accelerated our strategy, I am confident that we can continue to move forward toward our goals.”
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After a months-long standoff, Microsoft and Yahoo are now engaged in active merger talks, people involved in the discussions said Friday.
Microsoft, which had threatened to abandon its bid, has increased its offer “by several dollars” per share, one of those involved said.
A deal, however, was not close Friday night, these people said.
The merger talks represent an enormous breakthrough after weeks of behind-the-scenes discussions without any progress. The exact terms being discussed could not be learned.
The talks would explain the public silence from Microsoft this week. It has refused to disclose its plans, despite its earlier threat to start a proxy contest if Yahoo did not reach a deal with it by last Saturday.
A person involved in the talks cautioned that they could still be postponed or collapse entirely.
Shares of Yahoo rallied on news of the renewed talks. They closed at $28.67, up $1.86, or almost 7 percent. Microsoft shares edged down slightly.
Some Yahoo shareholders said that the flurry of phone calls they are receiving from both Yahoo and Microsoft has intensified. The two companies have been trying to find out what price large shareholders would find acceptable.
In recent days, Microsoft has privately raised the possibility of increasing its offer, currently valued at about $29.30 a share, to as much as $33.
Some shareholders have signaled they are holding out for more than $35. One shareholder said he believed an offer of $34 would probably be sufficient to consummate a deal.
Microsoft and Yahoo declined to comment.
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Microsoft’s chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, in persuasion mode before a technology fair in March. Mr. Ballmer is said to have made calls recently with a pitch to large Yahoo shareholders.
Microsoft’s directors met Wednesday to discuss how to proceed with the company’s attempted takeover of Yahoo, according to a person briefed on the discussions.
The board was expected to consider a range of options, including Microsoft raising its offer in an attempt to break the stalemate between the companies, this person said.
In recent days, Microsoft has considered increasing the bid, currently valued at $29.06 a share, to $32 or $33, said this person, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak about the discussions.
Microsoft’s chief executive Steven A. Ballmer, has personally called some large Yahoo shareholders to get their support for a bid in that range.
But Microsoft executives have been frustrated by signs that such shareholders are holding out for an even higher offer — in the range of $35 to $37 a share. Without that higher offer, those shareholders have been unwilling to press Yahoo’s management into entering serious negotiations, this person said.
A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment.
Earlier in April, Mr. Ballmer threatened to start a proxy fight to oust Yahoo’s board if the two companies did not reach a negotiated deal by April 26. The deadline passed without an agreement or substantive negotiations between the companies.
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