Curiosity piqued, I wanted to go and compare what happened in the Oracle BEA case versus Microsoft and Yahoo.

Oracle offered 25% premium over market price at $17 per share, it was considered low by BEA.
After some public fighting.
The final buyout price was 19.375. Which made the total over premium about 40%.

On the other hand, Microsoft offered $31 per share at a 62% premium. At the $33 they were willing to pay, it would be about 73% premium, at the 37 asked it would be 94% premium. In other words, if they ended up aroudn 34-35, it would be a similar increase in premium price (~15%).

So, in the end, is the problem just that Microsoft’s initial bid was too high?

In alternate reality land,
Microsoft offers at a $29 price for 52% premium. Eventually leading to a $33 deal.

50% is a high premium (see EA’s bid on Take Two), and I don’t think anyone would have blinked an eye at such a number.

Here’s my take:
Balmer wanted to close the deal fast. He figured, instead of going through a protracted and lengthy buyout discussion, he’d just circumvent it by offering essentially what the final price would be. Surprising to Balmer, not surprising to everyone else, Yahoo didn’t want to take the first offer.

From here, you can see why everything played out the way it did. Balmer thinks his offer makes perfect sense and refuses to outbid himself. Yahoo thinks if Microsoft is willing to pay this much, clearly they must be worth even more than that.

So where does that leave things? The big winner is GOOG. YHOO and MSFT are doing enough by themselves to sabotage their chances of winning without GOOG needing to jump in.

YHOO may do well, supposedly Panama is on its way up. The display product (AMP!) isn’t half bad (though not half good either), and hopefully will become a base for all display across the internet (though at the rate they are bleeding talent, I wouldn’t hold out hope here).

MSFT is exactly where it always has been. If they take my advice, they’d just start hiring all that talent that Yahoo is bleeding. Live, Hotmail, MSN aren’t bad brands. They aren’t winning, but they aren’t unknown to the average user. Internet Explorer is still the dominant web browser. If they were buying YHOO for the talent, and the talent is leaving in droves, they could just buy up the talent. Start with one or two good guys and let the good ole networking effect take over from there.

So, at this moment, Yahoo is at 24.08.

It looks like the stock hasn’t plummeted as far as people feared it would. Looks like there is still hope out there for an Oracle-BEA situation.

So, my thoughts as an ex-yahooer.

I feel bad for a lot of my former coworkers. There was a lot of uncertainty recently, and now they won’t even be getting their double-triggers. I am hoping for their sake it is the Oracle-BEA situation.

On the plus side, they no longer have to fear their project (AMP!) is going to get scrapped.

I would love to hear from existing yahoo-ers about their thoughts on all this.

So, as I am no longer part of any of that stuff. I wonder …

What’s preventing Microsoft from just trying to steal the good people from Yahoo and not buy the rest?

I mean, i don’t even think its that hard. You find yourself one good person, they will recommend others, and you just steamroll from there. It seems to me this would allow them to not only remove all the excess baggage of the useless people, but more importantly, have opportunity to target some of the really great people who has left in the past year.

Hm…This Yahoo stuff reminds me of something…

http://valleywag.com/378098/now-ballmer-and-murdoch-versus-yang-schmidt-and-falco

Ah yes.

It reminds me of a game of Diplomacy.

Right down to the taking over of people (Microsoft-Yahoo). Teaming up (Yahoo-Google, Yahoo-AOL, Yahoo-FIM, Microsoft-FIM). Even the amateur tactics (see Balmer and Yang letters). Only thing left is the backstabbing.

P.S. In case you are wondering which is Yahoo, that would be Austria. They are position right in the middle of everything, and can’t possibly win. The only thing they can do is try to team up with their neighbors before they are completely conquered by someone.

Just read the most recent Seth Godin post

Essentially, he says that Firefox users are a different breed than IE users, and as such should be treated differently. These people are the ones who went out of their way to download a different browser. He likens them to people who went to college.

I can’t help but first think what this means for internet advertising.

The Firefox users, while being a key demographic for many advertisers, are also the ones least likely to click on ads. They are the ones most likely to have extensions which block ads. Essentially, these are the users who in the current context of internet advertising are worth the least to a publisher. If you are going to “treat them differently” as Seth suggests, should it be treating them better or worse?

Now the hard part. How do you fix this? It is a big problem, as Advertisers right now are very much into hard metrics, its one of the big upsides to advertising on the internet in general. In fact, if I was an advertiser right now, I’d try and target these people at low cost, knowing I’m throwing out brand awareness while paying out very little for these users (who are some of my most coveted demographic). The long term solution, ironically, may come from the out-of-favor CPM. Sales needs to convince advertisers that if they are looking at branding, low CTR does not make a campaign fail. The metrics do not explain the true value.

Its interesting Seth Godin writes that there is no need for a resume, even for his internship, yet probably runs into the very problem that resume’s solve: Weeding out the chaff. When you are looking for a person for a job, you aren’t doing all your in depth research on every single candidate. You figure out the ones you want to look into more and then do your google search on them. You do this via their resume. If I am looking for a coder in PHP, I will weed out everyone without coding experience no matter how great their blog is.

The second problem here is that not everyone knows what their blog is about and majority of time, the blog has absolutely nothing to do with work. Just because someone may be an awesome photographer does not mean they can work well with others. Looking at my own blog, it is definitely all over the place. I would never want an employer to judge my work based on what i write here. They can get a sense of my personality, but there is no way you can judge the output of my work on this silly thing. Quite frankly, I don’t even have interest in having a blog that is purely about business, my interests extend further than just internet and advertising.

Rarely will I disagree with one of his remarks, but gotta go with the recruiters on this one. Resume’s are important. That being said, I believe everyone’s goal, however they get there, is to get to the point where a resume is no longer important.

Was reading Joel.  Very interesting read about development and stuff of that ilk.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html

It got me to start wondering though…
If the problem is that a lot of sites which are reading that you are using Internet Explorer and so need to have a bunch of hacks put into place but the new Internet Explorer 8 doesn’t need the hacks…

Why isn’t the solution just to have Internet Explorer 8 not show up as IE?
I mean…isn’t it interesting that browser types right now have all sorts of random things in them? (Mozilla etc etc etc)

If all the websites of the world consider IE8 to be a brand new browser (or one of the small players), the majority of websites that used to break will continue, but at least there aren’t all these random IE5,6,7 hacks getting in the way of IE8?

Obviously the answer can’t be that simple…I just wonder why not?

Right now, the big word on the internet is an API. People think, if we have an API, then we will have a platform. Once people start using our API, then they will be sticky onto our system. This is all true and is why API’s are great.

But how can you make your system truly sticky?

Instead of releasing just an API, you should make your system extensible. What do I mean by this? Look at Wordpress as a good example. Wordpress has already created the foundation and anything you would like to add to it, you can by only changing the pieces, instead of the whole.

In many cases, even in B2B cases, someone wants to use the API not because the existing one is bad, but because there is some functionality that works well for them which may be too niche for anyone else. With an API, the user would be expected to build their whole system from scratch. With extensibility, the user only has to change the pieces they do not like. If I wanted to create a pop-up ad appear everytime I load my main page, its an easy add to the code. If I wanted a random audio file to play with each post, again, its a simple changing of that page.

When you are building a platform, this is doubly important. Every company runs differently, they have different cultures, different workflows, when they decide to use your platform, they want to keep all of those things.

http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/010076.html

Jeremy mentions the “No Laptop” meeting rule and how horrible it is that there has to be a rule put in place for common courtesy.

The major problem to this rule is that there are plenty of legitimate reasons to have a laptop in meetings.  As the newer generations are coming out of college, they feel ever more comfortable with taking notes onto a laptop.  Making a uniform rule like this just removes a lot of the nice parts of having laptops in the first place.

There is definitely a problem though with people not paying attention to a meeting (and I will admit, I definitely have done it a lot.)

My proposed solution is actually pretty simple.  People should stop accepting meetings which they don’t have interest in.  A person who does not accept a meeting is saying they are ambivalent to the goals of the meeting.  Only the people who have accepted the meeting invite care about its outcome.  At the end of all meetings, people can get meeting notes.  In an ideal world, this leads to smaller meetings with made up of people who care about the goals.  If someone is curious about the outcome of the meeting, they can read the meeting notes.  Then, if it is a very big deal, one so big, it requires another meeting.  One can be set up where they will accept (because they now care).  Even if it leads to a few more meetings, they would be shorter meetings and there would actually be outcomes from said meetings.

Now granted, we don’t live in an ideal world, so what is a better answer?

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/

I don’t know very much about this blog. It is very good though, as I have been reading it for a couple weeks now. Essentially, it takes everything that the different candidates have done and actually runs a fact check of them. I had always wondered exactly how truthful some of the things these candidates say are and now I know.

The worst part about this blog is the fact that every single candidate has said things that don’t really pan out well. Its sad but “Politicians lie” exists because it works. Maybe this blog is the start of making that disappear.