Posts Tagged ‘yahoo’

Microsoft and Yahoo (Finally) Strike a Deal

The long, drawn-out game of “Deal or No Deal” between Microsoft and Yahoo! has finally come to an end. It’s been a long time coming, but the number two and three in the search engine market have finally joined forces in their fight against the dominant Google. The deal is not a buyout of Yahoo as past deals have been, but rather a sharing of technology and access to advertisers.

According to a CNN report, Yahoo will be using Microsoft’s search engine Bing underneath the hood to power its search engine while Yahoo will be focused on bringing in advertisers. Microsoft will then be sharing 88% of revenue from Yahoo’s searches and Microsoft will use existing search technology that Yahoo owns to integrate into its own platforms.

Microsoft has long been eyeing Yahoo as a take-over target, but both former CEO Jerry Yang and current CEO Carol Bartz stood against selling the company outright. Bartz reiterated her stance in May that their Yahoo’s search business was for sale for “boatloads” of money.

Yahoo has stated that the deal should increase its operating income by $500 million, allowing it to continue its other ventures without pouring money into search.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Jul 29th, 2009

Google Enters the Offline Client Game

Google has finally entered the ranks of its email competitors Yahoo! and Microsoft in offering an offline version of its interface. Yahoo! and Microsoft have both offered offline clients for their mail, calendar, and contact information with Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop and Windows Live Mail for some time now and Google has joined in with Offline Gmail. The product is still in Google Labs so it is still experimental, but it is in essense a broser plugin that allows the broser to cache a user’s mailbox and later will allow the user to cache the calendar and update while offline.

What makes this different from a local mail client such as Outlook or Thunderbird? Well, two things really. The first is a consistent interface. Windows Live Mail (the local client) looks just like Hotmail in the browser. The same goes for Zimbra Desktop and so on. A local mail client is not going to have a consistent interface which can be a pain should users be forced into using the client offline. The second benefit is the lack of a need for a third-party plugin. Mail certainly doesn’t need to have a plugin since it will go over POP or IMAP, but not the other data in your account. Even Microsoft Outlook cannot interface directly with Hotmail for contacts and calendars. If one wanted to sync their contacts from Gmail to say Thunderbird, they would have to install a third-party plugin to do so. The offline clients allow users to have the “syncing” ability without needing to worry about compatibility with the services.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jan 29th, 2009

Zimbra Hits 20 Million Paid Mailboxes

Zimbra is reporting that its paid mailbox count is now up to 20 million mailboxes. This is up from June of last year when Zimbra reported 11 million paid mailboxes. The open source Exchange competitor is really gaining some momentum and is surpassing Exchange in feature sets. Zimbra Collaboration Suite version 6.0 is due out later this year which includes full BES support, a stable release of its offline client, and allowing server-to-server sync for better HA and DR. Zimbra was acquired by Yahoo! in September of 2007 and could very well help out Yahoo! in its financial recovery if it keeps growing at this pace. The 20 million mailbox count only includes the pay-for version of Zimbra which offers mobility syncing as well as other features and does not include users of its free open source edition which a lot of companies use as well.

Congrats Zimbra!

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Filed under News : Comments (1) : Jan 20th, 2009

Microsoft Says No Deal to Yahoo

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made a public statement today stating that the company is no longer interested in a deal with Yahoo. The two companies have been going back and forth about the issue dating back as early as May of 2006. Yahoo received a large offer in January of this year for $45 billion or $31 per share. Yahoo turned the offer down and sought other opportunities. Potential deals between Yahoo and Google and Yahoo and AOL both surfaced in the interim, but both deals seem to have fallen through.

Just a couple of days ago, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang stated that he thought “the best thing for Microsoft to do is to buy Yahoo.” Yahoo’s stock closed today at $12.20, barely a third of its value in the deal proposed by Microsoft that Yahoo shot down. Ballmer’s response to Yang’s statement went like this: “Look, we made an offer, we made another offer. It was clear that Yahoo didn’t want to sell the business to us, and we moved on.”

Microsoft wanted to purchase Yahoo’s business as a way to get a jump start on its battle to contest Google for the search market share. Microsoft and Yahoo, however, seem to be losing ground on Google on market share. According to seoconsultants.com, Yahoo and Microsoft both lost around 3% of their market share from the end of 2007 through October. Google swept up that market share jumping just over 6% over that same time span. Sadly enough, that 3% that Microsoft lost was almost half of its market share. Google seems to be eating up the market and there’s nothing anyone else has been able to do about it. According to Alexa, Yahoo does have the most visited site on the Internet. Also, Yahoo recently picked up Zimbra which looks like it could be one of the biggest rivals to Microsoft Exchange, so the future of Yahoo isn’t entirely bleak assuming they can stop the bleeding and pull out some profits.

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Filed under News, Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Nov 7th, 2008

Possible Yahoo, AOL Merger?

According to Reuters, sources close to Yahoo and AOL say they are in the midst of due diligence for a possible merger of some services. This comes in the wake of a series of offers from a Microsoft buyout over the last few years. Sources say they are interested in how AOL’s content and advertising services could be integrated into Yahoo’s. A deal between Yahoo and Google was rumored earlier this summer, though it would have some serious antitrust concerns to overcome. The aim of the consolidation is to cut costs by joining duplicate services.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Oct 30th, 2008