At the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco Wednesday night, Yahoo! Inc. CEO Jerry Yang said, "To this day, I have to say that the
best thing for Microsoft [Corp.] to do is to buy Yahoo!. I don't think that is a bad idea at all. ... At the right price, whatever the price is, we are willing to sell the company," Cnet.com reported. Yang's words didn't resonate well with our sister blog Tech Confidential, which said it has
become wearisome, and not particularly pleasant, having to repeatedly whack Yang in the back of the head like some recalcitrant teenager.
It's doubtful Yahoo! would get the $33 per share offer Microsoft once offered. Yahoo! said in mid-July it was willing to sell itself for that price as it rejected Microsoft's overtures to buy the Internet giant's search business. And the fact that
Google Inc. walked away from a
revised search ad deal with Yahoo!, after DOJ officials
turned down the possible monopolistic partnership, puts Microsoft in the driver's seat. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently said he may be interested in buying the search business or all of Yahoo!. Although, in the past,
Ballmer has said he was no longer interested in a deal, that it was never strategic, and now the company had an extra $50 billion to spend on other acquisitions. So its anyone's guess as to what will come.
And as for a Yahoo!-AOL combo, The Deal's David Shabelman got this analyst quote: "First, merger integration would likely be a nightmare. Each company operates on top of different tech platforms and has overlapping/competitive service offerings (e.g., e-mail, ad networks, etc.). And, culturally, the two are very different (e.g., East vs. West Cost, Internet-only vs. division of media conglomerate)."
Still, Yahoo! has other plans while deals are floated around. The Cnet report noted Yahoo! is "rewiring itself from the inside out" to make the consumer experience social throughout and provide hooks to developers. Yang said the approach was very different from Facebook, as the users have different ideas in mind when going to the respective sites. And Yang is excited about a new ad platform Yahoo! is developing, called APT.
In his blog, Yang said APT would be to 2009 what radio was to 1924, TV to 1947, color TV to 1965 and the Internet to 1993.
Don Draper, who plays an ad exec on TV series "Mad Men," helped to unveil the ad platform in September along with Yang, president Sue Decker and U.S. region head Hilary Schneider.
Hopefully Microsoft is a fan of the show. -
Baz HiralalGo to the Cnet storySee Yang's blog on APT
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Juergen Lasowski
And the winners are...
Thanks, Yang finally understood...
Only Microsoft can save Yahoo.
The best thing for Microsoft to do is to buy Yahoo... To Survive!