Microsoft announced it will not be going forward with its plan to buy Yahoo, after it was clear the two sides could not agree on a price, and Steve Ballmer elected not to risk his entire career on the deal. Here are some links about the news:
Valleywag is reporting that Yahoo is planning on launching Yahoo Buzz, a social news site that will rank news based on popular search results and user voting. Buzz will be designed to compete with Digg, which is all well and good, except that it will have a particularly nauseating twist: Only sites that run Yahoo Publisher Network ads will be shown on the site.
Google is running this special Doodle logo for Valentine’s Day: That’s actually pretty sweet. Last year’s Doodle was a mess, with a lot of sites reporting that Google had forgotten the “l” in Google: Here’s the 2005 Valentine’s logo:
Microsoft has made available software for Windows Mobile Smartphones that gives free access to news and weather information, thanks to its MSN Direct network. Any Smartphone (that’s a phone running Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone or Windows Mobile 6 Standard) can pick up the download at phone.msndirect.com.
Hitwise has a look at the visitor statistics for Yahoo and Microsoft’s websites, showing just how much market share in the United States the combined company would have. Total market share for all Yahoo is 13.2% of all of U.S. internet traffic, with MSN having just 2.4% and Google 7.7% Combined, they would have 15.6%, over twice as much as Google.
Do you really have any idea how big Yahoo is, or hell, how big MSN is? There’s a lot of overlap between the two, and Long Zheng & Josh Philips have been kind enough to generate a nice chart to show the two. The chart is reproduced below, with some notes added by me regarding what I think about which service will be rolled into the other.
Microsoft has picked up Greg Linden, one of my favorite geeks and the guy who created Findory and Amazon.com’s recommendation engine. Greg’s biggest strength comes in the form of personalized services, as both at Amazon and Findory he designed websites that learned from user behavior and improved what was shown to the user in extremely effective ways, first with books, then with news and blogs.
Microsoft, in its conference call Friday regarding the Yahoo offer, said that “We love the Yahoo brand”, when asked about what would happen to MSN and Windows Live.
While the big deal in the Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo is the money and market share changing hands, there are plenty of Microsofties who are wondering which Yahoo employees will become their co-workers, their bosses, and their replacements.
I missed Microsoft’s earnings release last week (I was on a flight back from my vacation), so here’s a look back. Microsoft’s revenue for its second quarter were up 30% to $16.37 billion, and profit was up 92% to $6.48 billion.
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