When Microsoft offered nearly fifty billion dollars last year to acquire Yahoo I thought this was the stupidest thing Redmond had ever done, and in hindsight not accepting the offer was indeed the stupidest thing Yahoo had ever done. In a new development this week Yahoo has announced that it was ditching search and concentrating on its ad service in a 10-year agreement with Microsoft. Effectively Microsoft ended up getting almost as much control over Yahoo as they would have by owning it but for a fraction of the cost, while sidestepping antitrust regulations that would have resulted from an acquisition. In the end it goes to show that Yahoo really has been managed by the dumbest people in the IT business for the past couple of years…
I can only hope it fails as fast.
A former dBase architect sees ominous parallels between Ashton-Tate swan-song dBase IV and Windows Vista. Looks like Microsoft’s much-maligned OS could in fact be the beginning of the end for Redmond. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Bill Gates has decided to end his day-to-day involvement in the company at this time.
The Great DVD Swindle?
With two competing rather-similar-but-incompatible standards both coming from industry heavyweights it’s easy to think that the high-definition DVD industry is being set up to fail no matter which camp wins. And now film director Michael Bay is squarely alleging that HD-DVD is actually somewhat of a scam orchestrated by Microsoft to ensure the failure of both high definition DVD formats and eventually ensure success for its own upcoming downloadable solutions. Hmm… Sony vs. Microsoft… there’s really no one to root FOR here.