“The talks are still at a very early stage and may not result in a deal, according to these people. Among the most thorny issues, one of these people said, are the terms under which Microsoft would compensate News Corp., if at all, to feature its news content, which ranges from The Wall Street Journal to the Sun of the U.K.,” Wingfield and Ovide report.
“It isn’t clear whether the talks include News Corp.’s non-newspaper sites, such as its popular MySpace social-network or Fox television properties,” Wingfield and Ovide report. “According to a person familiar with the matter, News Corp. initiated the conversations with Microsoft. The software giant has held conversations with other publishers as well, this person said.”
Read more in the full article here.
Despite the success of Fox Television, Fox News and 20th Century Fox movie studios, News Corps online ventures have been constant money losers, including MySpace. How would a deal with the one company doing even worse online than them reverse their fortunes? What is the possible upside of delisting from Google? Inquiring minds want to know.
MSNBC any thoughts on the matter.
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”wink” style=”border:0;” />
*They* initiated talks with MS??? After MS’s track record with its partners??
News Corp must have a death wish.
@HMCIV
Uh yeah…. What the hell is News Corp. thinking?
just my $0.02
gzero
The current business model is killing old style print. Something has to give.
Of course others will see this as the Klingons joining the Romulans….
Google is showing the Murdoch search results for free. MS will want to be paid to show them. Out of the frying pan…
news content…to the Sun of the U.K
Good job I didn’t have any liquid in my mouth when I read that.
The notion that The Sun is a newspaper is on a par with believing that Steve Ballmer is a visionary genius.
MS and Murdoch – a perfect pair!
Why the hell would anyone cut themselves off from 90% of their customers?
What idiot runs News Corp. anyway? This idea is so Bass Ackwards that he must be from Australia.
These 2 bloated companies deserve each other. Truly a match made in Hell.
Don’t be to quick to write this pair off, thinking they’ll go down in flames together. I can assure you, you’re not going to like what they have planned.
Microsoft is carving up the Internet, thinking, if you can’t beat them on a level playing field (net neutral) buy up big chunks of it starting with content.
M$ will sell them on ways to monetize their content and protect it with proprietary readerhatEhat more could Murdoch as for, but a devilish partner.
This is just the beginning of the “land” war. Others will align with their strategy as well, including all the fringe players who have been marginalized by the swift current of open source and fair market practices.
Microsoft is losing the popular vote, so now it will attempt an end-run on the system.
You watch, Microsoft will start making partners of those who control the bandwidth. It will provide them the tools they need, at very attractive prices, to maintain control and better leverage what little power they have over us all.
Goodbye Uncle Walt!
@G4Dualle,
Interesting angle and a very valid point. Now, it seems that who can control the content will be placed in an advantageous position to profit handsomely which is why the record labels are fighting and lobbying so hard to keep the status quo.
However, I disagree with one thing. Microsoft has no power over me. I don’t use their products and haven’t for awhile now. Thanks to Apple, iWorks, a vibrant Mac development community, Linux, Unix and the open source community, I don’t worry or care what Microsoft does anymore. From project management to office programs to file and web serving, I don’t have to use or consider a single Microsoft solution.
Lastly, let News Corp. jump on the sinking ship and lose even more advertising revenue. They’ll be regretting that decision for a long time and since news and lots of other information can be found from far more sources, I don’t think their content will be missed from Google’s indexes at all.
@ G4Dualie,
Amen, brother/sister. Which is why net neutrality (which should be a non-partisan issue) must be preserved. It’s the antitrust wars of the late 19th, early 20th century all over again.
#1 the only way for them to truly employ this is to make it subscription based, we all know that would fail
#2 MS and news corp’s questionable motives and attitudes belong together, it will just cement many peoples opinions of them, Fox and many other parts of the news corp conglomerate are already on the fringe of real news, and inflate crap they want to get air.
#3 more than set a precedence it will change perspectives. doesn’t news corp realize M$ is already on its way down the tubes?,
#4 It’s hard to imagine a company with less morals than M$; that company is news corp
Revolution anyone?
I think the legacy news companies have been tricked into thinking of the internet as the Napster of the 90s.
The problem is, news is completely different from pre-recorded media – trying to lock your content away, or making it exclusively available through only certain channels, will simply mean that people will go elsewhere for their news. They can’t copyright facts or current events (yet – though I’m sure they’re working on that), so there’s no way they can be the sole gatekeepers through which we learn what’s happening.
So doing something like this would be little more than suicide. Which is why the paywalls they’ve also threatened to erect aren’t happening, because that would be doing more or less the same thing with the same results.
Apple should just get it over with and start their own search engine.. then they can merge with, oh wait news corp owns all the news agencies.. nevermind…
Microsoft and News Corp are a match made it heaven, a perfect Sarah Palin-Glenn Beck ticket. Balmer and Murdoch on stage together would have the folks at places like Apple and Google giving each other high-fives at their success. I can see it all now: “And here’s Fox News, the best source for news, brought to you by the Microsoft, the finest in computer quality.” Yeah, right on!
Who’s News Corp?
Is this what the Internet is going to become?
“Let’s see, I want to read a story from X news agency. So I need to go to the Y search engine. No wait, is that the Z engine? Maybe it’s the WTF engine?!?”
Oh, just forget it . . .
yes, tt, they are forming the Klingulons.
I think it is a move to get more news gathering organizations together for a new model of info distribution.
Sometimes you turn to the second fiddle when the first chair ain’t playin’ yer tune….(until it starts sounding like ‘The Devil Went Down to Redmond’, which you hope your bluff has worked by then).
But the Klingulons sound soooo much cooler.
then there is this
http://kara.allthingsd.com/20091123/while-microsoft-is-talking-to-publishers-paying-a-lot-to-rent-content-for-bing-to-thwart-google-is-unlikely/
@JadisOne:
Microsoft does have power over you. It has billions of dollars to spend and affect technology, searching, etc. Companies like Apple have to respond to Microsoft or develop strategies to handle MS. A company may have a radical idea about how to create a new word processing software, but it has to overcome the status quo of Word and how people are used to interacting with it.
Finally, News Corp’s online businesses may be money losers now, but Murdoch is positioning himself for the long haul. Cutting Google off at the knees for searching his content is big, even if it may be appoaching anti-trust issues if the agreement is exclusive. The Justice Dept. and the EU already don’t like MS’s business practices.
Ack glat Zdonk, das unkt dorek strink glak jlaew klong poo-poo steil Romulans!!!!
(That is Klingon for……..No TowerTone, I beg to differ. We have no wish to join forces with those poo-poo head Romulans)
Papers are doing fine in other countries.
They focus on circulation, giving subscribers a reason to read the paper.
Here they focus on advertisers. Who cares about the readers.
OOPS.
Another item of note is Comcast buying a controlling stake in NBC Universal. This is a perfect example of a company who already controls the bandwidth, but has no content, and has seen the writing on the wall.
All of these ISPs like Cox, Comcast, Time-Warner Cable, DirecTV, Dish, as well as hundreds of locals don’t like what the future holds for them; reduced to dumb pipes, essentially becoming toll gates to where all the real fun and excitement is taking place, a place where monetizing content hidden away in vaults will pay off handsomely for years.
It’s only natural that ISPs would align themselves with the content providers. Likewise, content holders will want to own these toll booths eventually, in order to control the price of admission.
We’ve seen this taking place on Cable, wherein the networks are losing ground everyday to rogue studios who are redefining what entertainment is. The Simpsons is a good example of News Corps pushing the envelope of taste and entertainment.
YouTube is a capital example of an entrepreneur opening a “woodstock” to showcase talent. Google comes along snaps them up and gives it away for free!
What really pisses Microsoft off is the fact that Google, who has championed open source, chose a compression standard like mpeg-4 and H.264 for their video content rather than Silverlight or AVI or whatever flavor Microsoft is using these days.