It has been nearly a week since Microsoft’s deadline for Yahoo! to accept their merger offer has passed. There had been indications that Microsoft would simply walk away from the deal. But then on Wednesday, it was reported the Microsoft Board was meeting about the possible acquisition. Then late Thursday there was the possibly Microsoft was going to attempt a hostile take over. Today the New York Times is reporting Microsoft and Yahoo are in active merger talks. According to an anonymous source involved in the discussion: Microsoft, which had threatened to abandon its bid, has increased its offer “by…
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The Wall Street Journal is reporting the Microsoft Board is meeting today in regards to their possible take-over of Yahoo! The people say that it’s unclear what final approach Microsoft will take, but that discussions between the two companies have been stymied by a stark divide on price. Microsoft has said privately in recent days that it’s willing to offer as much as $32 or $33 a share, well above the $29.12-a-share value of its original cash-and-stock offer as of Tuesday’s market close, these people say. But major Yahoo shareholders have signaled they want in the range of $35 to…
This past Saturday, April 26th was the deadline Microsoft had given Yahoo before they would go directly to the shareholders. This deadline was established via a follow-up letter from Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer to Yahoo on April 5th. On last Thursday, April 24th Microsoft finance chief Chris Liddell made comments to investors and then employees: …another of the company’s options is to abandon the bid entirely. If no deal was reached by Saturday, the options are “to try to facilitate a transition, to possibly go directly to Yahoo shareholders. Or to walk away and go back to our original organic…
It seems Yahoo is trying everything they can to keep themselves from being acquired by Microsoft, or at least put pressure on Microsoft to up to the bounty so to say. In the past few weeks, AOL/Time Warner, Google and NewsCorp have entered into the picture. Here is a brief over-view of what is happening with each company. More detailed information can be found here via Todd Bishop’s Microsoft Blog. Yahoo: Trying to avoid or sweeten Microsoft’s original offer. Testing an advertising partnership with Google. Reportedly getting close to a deal with Time Warner’s AOL unit to combine their Internet…
John Lilly the new CEO of Mozilla Corporation is interviewed on the February 7th The GigaOM Show. Find out what the organization has in store for 2008 and if they will file for IPO. John also explains his and Mitchell’s roles in Mozilla. Other topics discussed in this episode include: Microsoft makes hostile bid for Yahoo! MySpace opens developer platform The entire show is about 14 minutes and 30 seconds and the interview with John Lilly is a little over 8 minutes. John also give us his perspective about Microsoft hostile bid for Yahoo! Plus John discusses Thunderbird, David Asher…
Last week Microsoft made an unsolicited offer to acquire Yahoo! with an initial asking price of $31/per share which was about 62% higher than the January 31st closing price. On Wednesday, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang sent an internal e-mail seeking to keep the company’s employees focused on its strategy despite the uncertainty created by Microsoft’s unsolicited acquisition bid. Also on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that a merger involving Yahoo! and Google would be unlikely due to anti-trust (only Microsoft can get away with anti-trust, at least in the US) and regulatory concerns. To add even more mystery to…
And No, It Was Not By Google! It was announced earlier today FoxyTunes, the very popular media player toolbar/extension for Firefox & Thunderbird and music service has been acquired by Yahoo! Music. From the FoxyTunes Blog: “We’ve been talking to the Yahoo! Music team about deepening our cooperation, and we quickly discovered that not only do they understand and appreciate what we’ve done with FoxyTunes, but they also share our vision of Universality and Openness” Not really too sure what this is going to mean for future development of the extension. Further seems kinda odd that Yahoo! would acquire a…
While reading Wladimir Palant’s (Adblock Plus author) blog about the improvements in ad blocking with the future Firefox 2.0.0.4 build, I came across this interesting piece of information about Yahoo Maps & Fx Nightlies: Finally, Yahoo Maps uses browser sniffing that causes it to behave strangely in Firefox nightlies. To “fix” go to about:config, find the preference general.useragent.extra.firefox and replace “BonEcho” by “Firefox”. So what exactly does “behave strangely in Firefox nightlies” mean? Take a look at these screen shots below (opens a new tab) with general.useragent.extra.firefox set to: Firefox BonEcho/2.0.0.4pre I had stopped using Yahoo! Maps because it did…
I’ve been a Windows Live Mail Beta (@live.com) user for a while now. So far it has been the best of the web based e-mail clients I have used. I’ve used Lycos, MyWay, Yahoo and even Hotmail in the past but the accounts always become bombarded with spam. Even with the spam protection enabled I still get up to 10+ spam e-mails in my Yahoo Mail INBOX on a daily basis. The only downside, since Windows Live Mail is a Microsoft product, I have to use IE Tab for the messages to display correctly. Sometime in the near future, Windows…
While I was searching the Firefox Addons page for the Yahoo!Mail notifier extension, I came across this interesting and very convenient extension. One thing that has always bugged my about Yahoo!Mail is once you are in your Inbox (or any other folder) you have to click on the message to view it. With the AJAX Yahoo! Mail Extension, a small ‘plus sign’ is added next to each message in your Inbox (or other folder) which will allow you to preview the message without leaving the folder. As a bonus, you can also download attachments from your Yahoo!Mail with just one…