MS offering to buy out Yahoo

February 3rd, 2008, 6:11 pm

They wouldn't own more than the market share of search engines. I can name 5 or 6 of them off the top of my head. Google just missed the boat.

February 4th, 2008, 8:43 am

Google is retaliating ... going to policy makers and reaching out to yahoo, as MS would potentially monopolize the internet with this purchase ... this will prove to be interesting.

February 4th, 2008, 9:10 am

I don't see how they would monopolize the internet at all. Nothing I do on the net has anything to do with Yahoo and never will. Not only that, anyone who doesn't like the idea of the purchase can boycott Yahoo.

February 4th, 2008, 9:17 am

Don2007 wrote:

I don't see how they would monopolize the internet at all. Nothing I do on the net has anything to do with Yahoo and never will. Not only that, anyone who doesn't like the idea of the purchase can boycott Yahoo.

Yeah, I intend to. But that's going to be quite difficult, there is NOTHING to replace flickr (yes, there are photo-sharing sites, but none with the same community feel), I've got my memory of the net stored in del.icio.us, I still use their mail occasionally etc.
On top of this, what about all of Yahoo!'s contributions to open source projects? Their Wikipedia donations? Their OpenID project? YUI?
This is not just about search, and MS know it. Everything I've said above has alternatives, but this just reduces the level of competition available. Yahoo were active (often leader of) in many areas.

February 4th, 2008, 10:21 am

I didn't know that Yahoo made contributions to open source. Am I correct in guessing that there will be no more of those?

February 4th, 2008, 10:27 am

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/wha ... buys-yahoo

Good (if vague) summary of the open source prospects. Apart from their own developer portal (which includes loads of stuff) they've apparently contributed to: "PHP, FreeBSD, Squid, gSOAP, Hadoop", not to mention that they own Zimbra.

February 4th, 2008, 11:30 am

http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/M/MICROSOFT_YAHOO_CLASH?SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2008-02-04-09-05-46

:-/ ... They are apparently fairly close companies ... But the anti-trust must sign off on it before Yahoo would be added to M$ even if Yahoo sold out. So there might be a chance?

February 4th, 2008, 3:05 pm

dyefade: Vague is an understatement, so I searched a little further to see exactly what they have done for the open source world.
They have released two libraries for public use under the BSD license.
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/ ... d_des.html

As far as PHP goes, they just decided to use it instead of using their proprietary scripting language. I see that as a book decision to save money, not as a contribution.

I'm not knocking Yahoo for that. I'm just trying to find the facts.

kbergmann: The AP article that appeared on wired really didn't tell me anything but that's AP for you. I was never a fan of AP anyway.

[penguin]

February 4th, 2008, 3:53 pm

Should be intresting to see what happens to people who are hosted with yahoo, I would put money on it that MS up the prices of hosting

February 4th, 2008, 4:00 pm

Trust you to think of the hosting... how much of Yahoo's business is related to hosting anyway?

[penguin]

February 4th, 2008, 4:35 pm

lol someone had to think of it A lot of people have hosting with yahoo. Im just looking forward to seeing how much downtime there will be

February 4th, 2008, 7:28 pm

As far as downtime goes, prollie about the same (if they don't change it at all and can fix it as effeciently)

If they alter it, I'd get a new host if I had a page with them ...

[joebert]

February 4th, 2008, 7:45 pm

Let's not forget Yahoos' recent platnum sponsorship of Apache.

February 4th, 2008, 8:02 pm

Ok, that's saying something for Yahoo.

On another note, there is something I just learned. It's not the first offer MS made. The attempted to buy Yahoo when Yahoo had another CEO. That CEO rejected the offer by MS.

I want to go back to something I said before. Google blew it by not trying to buy Yahoo themselves and if the deal is completed, it's too bad for google. They were asleep at the wheel.

February 9th, 2008, 3:35 pm

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20 ... nohoo.html

Hurray!