“Citigroup said it is likely Microsoft Corp. will raise its $31-per-share offer for Yahoo Inc. and upgraded Yahoo shares to ‘buy’ from ‘hold,'” Jennifer Robin Raj reports for Reuters.
Raj reports, “The brokerage also raised its price target on Yahoo’s stock to $34 from $31, saying it believed Microsoft remained committed to its offer and ‘is capable of and willing to’ increase that bid to conclude the deal. ‘While we continue to see no other competing bidders, we believe Yahoo is aggressively pursuing strategic alternatives,’ analyst Mark Mahaney said in a note to clients.”
Full article here.
Go Apple; up to 140.14! That is a good trend, let’s hope that is a trend!
MS: offers billions for a company that will do nearly nothing for it, and that it will destroy, sucking the very soul out of yahoo like some corporate vampire.
Apple: changes the world with a phone and a music player and and UNIX OS.
wow, what a difference.
while MS spends money hand over fist for ill advised game systems and company buyouts and attempt after attempt to show that they can compete, Apple is kicking butt and taking names.
….i should make popcorn to eat while i watch this!
@shen:
I agree with you. It’s really fun to watch M$ make all these blunders in front of the world to see. Sort of like the blind leading the blind (no offense to blind people).
MS apparently does not have enough money to buy Yahoo unless it takes out a load.
Psssstttt…hey Ballmer….want to borrow a few bucks? Ask Steve Jobs….Apple’s got a spare $18 Bill he can lend you. I am sure he can make you a deal you just can’t refuse…hehehehehe!
….errrrr make that a LOAN
Sorry, I’ve got a beloved Flickr account, so I don’t have the stomach for the popcorn, much less for the show itself.
@Buster
“MS apparently does not have enough money to buy Yahoo unless it takes out a load.”
I thought you made perfect sense
Leave Flickr Alone!
There are 3 outcomes for the impending MS takeover:
1. It will kill Yahoo.
2. It will kill MS.
3. It will kill MS and Yahoo.
No way will it improve Yahoo.
Though such a deal doesn’t make sense to me, I’m sure many here will enjoy the sight of Microsoft forced to raise money to fund this deal, then twist itself into knots trying to rebuild the open-source heavy Yahoo to run on Windows. The best will leave for Google or just start their own companies.
Apple had to reallocate sources from Leopard to the iPhone project. That resulted in a few months delay, but two great projects. Now imagine Microsoft trying to digest Yahoo. Can one say “train wreck”? Pass the popcorn. This will be fun to watch.
I agree with you. It’s really fun to watch M$ make all these blunders in front of the world to see. Sort of like the blind leading the blind (no offense to blind people).
Maybe it’s time for a new, non-discriminatory catch phrase:
It’s like Gates leading Ballmer.
Right as always, Raymond.
Hmmm, read an article a while ago that explained why MS would want Yahoo.
Yahoo provides / supports a HUGE number of web pages. I dont remember the numbers but its huge. MS is looking to control those pages and more so to control the advertising that goes on those pages. Even the free yahoo e-mail has adverts running on them, guess who gets to decide what ads run on those pages? YEP.
So now we know why MS wants to buy Yahoo.
en
I wish Apple would get with it and buy Yahoo…
I just don’t want to have to run and hide if M$$$ BUYS Yahoo!
Let alone change cable providers yet again!
The real assets Microsoft has are it’s Windows and Office monopolies and it’s huge war-chest full of ill gotten gains.
It has screwed up Vista and is about to stop selling XP so there goes that Windows revenue source.
People are learning that the feature bloated Office Suite they bought in ’97 or ’00 or ’02 or ’04 is good enough and they really do not need to upgrade their personal or business computers to Office ’07 or Office ’08. The Office revenue is slowly fading away.
Now they are getting ready to piss away that big mountain of cash on the next big thing. Internet add revenue.
I’m sure MDN could tell them GOOD LUCK WITH THAT! They will be going up against Google, the best in the business, and Microsoft really doesn’t have a clue in this war.
Microsoft is going to need a lot of cash in a couple of years to ‘innovate’ their way out of the mess they ‘suddenly’ find themselves in and the cupboard will be bare.
Then the shit will really hit the fan.
This is going to be fun.
Microsoft is currently in a red giant star mode. They are trying to expand their reach with that soon to be disasterous yahoo buyout. While simultaneously putting out fires on multiple fronts. Eventually the red giant will burn out and turn into a little tiny….irrelevant dwarf star. Still alive and kicking but no one will care.
Goodbye and good riddance M$!
The good thing is: after MSFT is done with spending the rest of their cash on the Yahoo “aquisition”, they will be really cheap to pick up!
Bill will perhaps call his old friend from 1 Infinite Loop and ask for a return-favor (you might remember that episode from 1997).
Of course, the first thing Saint Steve would have to do is to fire roughly 85% of the people not working in server-areas, because they obviously can’t get done shit!
(MSFT: 79k employees vs. AAPL 21k – and AAPL actually designs all of their hardware, down to keyboard and mice)
@Rainer:
I never thought of that. Apple buying out MS. Hmmm….well how do ya like that?
Thats extreme irony for you. Karma….justice. Maybe the feds were right ultimately by essentially leaving MS’s monopoly alone. They knew that eventually……the market always corrects itself.
If Micros**t buys Yahoo I will DITCH all contact with Yahoo faster than you can say googlemaps.
Yahoo Emails, Yahoo Calendars, Flickr account, geocities……..
I do hope someone is paying heed…
@olternaut.
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The winers at minimsft.blogspot.com all agree that a lot of people should be fired.
The problem is that nobody seems to have the guts to do it.
So, if this Yahoo-thingy really goes down the drain, institutional shareholders might try to talk Steve B. out of MSFT (difficult, he owns A LOT of shares) and pressure for some really, really, really tough (Neutron-Jack-style-tough) CEO.
If you think this is all bullshit, think twice:
AAPL is currently doing what any good company needs to do: it’s literally sweating and bleeding over their products, cranking out innovations that people need, want and use at insane intervals.
No aquisitions, no re-org, no board-shuffling, no insane money-burning-binge. Very little publicly viewable BS, a few lawsuits from some patent-trolls: I wish the banking-industry had been run with such diligence in the past…
Compare that to MSFT and you can at least argue that they’re most likely heading for a very slippery road.
When they hit the ground, they’ll leave a big bomb-crater, that’s for sure. AAPL and some other companies (like SUN) have positioned themselves far away enough from MSFT so that they won’t be hit by too many shrapnels, though
Yahoo: Just Say No.
I do hope someone is paying heed…
Either Apple or Google had better be smart & quick enough to seize this kind of opportunity.
How sweet it’d be, to get a good chunk of Yahoo’s users, with little cost, when MSFT fscks it all up.
Microsoft is currently in a red giant star mode …Eventually the red giant will burn out and turn into a little tiny….irrelevant dwarf star.
Look at the very bright side: it’ll make for one spectacular supernova!
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Just remember to be well away when this baby does blow….
Looks like a marriage of two losers to me, with lots of incompatible attitudes and practices. Should be fun to watch. Meanwhile I will be abandoning my Yahoo emails accounts. It is dismaying how Yahoo has ignored the Mac platform. I can think of one Yahoo service that still requests OS8-9 !
Do not underestimate Microsoft. They do not know how make a good software, but they do know how to make money. (I wouldn’t be surprised if they were quietly investing in AAPL during the recent downturn). There will always be a place for no2 search engine. Microsoft will go for YHOO and they will have to do it soon. Before Google reports the earnings, which is on April 17th. If Google reports good earnings it will lift Yahoo too. If Microsoft wants to buy it, they have to do before that happens.
I’ve been watching and waiting to see what happens with this MS-Yahoo thing, while investigating alternatives to Yahoo’s sites and services (as I’m sure are many other Yahoo users). I’ll probably be down to just their email and IM when it’s all said and done.
As much as I’d love to watch Microsoft self-destruct by moving forward with this, I’m troubled by their continued strategy of acquiring so many things that people have almost no choice but to deal with them in some capacity. That’s the only way Microsoft keeps itself afloat, by putting people in virtual “no choice” situations, on the desktop, in the office, and now possibly online.
The danger is that it might actually work, at least in the short term, and they’ll leverage Yahoo’s huge portfolio of websites to stifle web interoperability. “Visit Flickr, now with special secret sauce that works only in IE8!” *shudder*
MW: action, as I hope the EU takes some, if this goes through (or the US Justice Department, assuming they’re not still too beholden to Microsoft’s millions…)