Steve Ballmer, bad cop.
Bill Gates, good cop, apparently.
Gates - the world’s richest coder and philanthropist - basically told Yahoo! that if they want to increase the $31/offer, they have to come to the table like big boys.
Notice no mention of the word “final” in today’s talk: “Our offer is fair,” sure is, the stock was at $19 before the offer, a 62% is plenty fair, but it’s not final because YHOO was at $34 a mere two months before the offer… and its holdings in Asian securities alone tack up to $15 almost.
The omission of the world “final” speaks volumes. I think it’s clear that Gates and Ballmer realize that they have Yahoo! within their grasp. While the proxy option remains that, an option, they are actually being the more diplomatic (and why wouldn’t they be… now) party.
While YHOO is coming across as clueless and hapless, MSFT is doing and saying all of the right things. I hate to say this, but I do wonder what MSFT could do with YHOO. I know this is blasphemy with the hippie love crowd out west, but think about: isn’t GE management technically capable of acquiring all if not most companies and getting more out of them?
That’s what I see here: YHOO management dropping the ball and MSFT’s potentially being able to wring out more value out of them. Say what you want, but despite all of the risks, threats and weaknesses facing MSFT’s core operations, the company is doing better than ever.
Long: YHOO
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WatchMojo NewsletterLast week, Amazon.com’s S3 service crashed. Shit happens, no doubt.
But since a lot of companies relied on S3, many were impacted.
This is basically an extension of the unwise API craze: I think if you want to test an idea on an API, great. If you want to build a business on it, you’re screwed, because, well, shit happens. I covered this here, here and here.
The same goes for services like Feedburner, who many have used instead of developing in-house tools. I am not sure if this is a one-time blip or Google really just killed an otherwise useful feature. I’m not sure this is tantamount to Google being Evil, it’s that Google is a business and they are looking for monetizable growth.
The point is: companies really need to justify resources these days and going forward. Yes, the Web remains faster growing than any other media, but that’s specifically the problem: we need manpower to maintain let alone fine-tune services, so a company like Google will put resources where the revenue is. This is the same kind of problem Google faces at YouTube, something I covered last week.
A lot of startups are built as features and tools for larger companies. Specifically because a company like Google is hunting for revenue and won’t devote the resources to build something like Feedburner (pre-sale to Google) then a company like Feedburner comes to life. All this does, really, is create an opportunity for someone else to pick up the baton and fill the need.
In this context, I’m not sure if this means businesses won’t count on outside companies, I just think someone else will come and fill the gap.
