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…
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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…
AT&T is trying to get in the to the web browser market now with their own browser called Pogo. Before you run out and download this keep in mind, it is still in development and in limited private beta. You can sign up to be notified when the public beta will be opened. Further, unless you have a really powerful machine don’t even bother as the performance would stink. I am sure you are thinking “It is a web browser, how powerful of a machine would I need?” Well, the minimum requirements are 1.6GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, and a…
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…
Despite protests, petitions and lobbying to keep Windows XP as an alternative to Vista, Microsoft has announced today they are still planning on phasing out Windows XP on June 30th (which had been extended from January 31st). After this date Windows XP will no longer come pre-installed on most new PC’s. There is however an exception, “ultra-low cost” machines. These include Asus Eee PC, Intel Classmate PC and those PCs generally lack the hardware needed to run Windows Vista. In this case Windows XP will still be available for these machines until June 30, 2010 or one-year after the release…
It was in late June 2007 when I saw the ‘other’ marketing Video for The Big Ass Table, otherwise known as Microsoft Surface. Microsoft has announced beginning April 17th, select (Atlanta, San Antonio, San Fransisco and New York City) AT&T wireless stores will get the tables. More stores will be added, but only within the these four markets come May. The big U.S. wireless provider says its retail customers will be able to place specific mobile phones on Surface’s 30-inch screen to learn about features, accessories and rate plans. They also will be able to compare two phones at a…
Back in May 2007, Microsoft publicly claimed Free Software Violates Patents! Todd Bishop had a lengthy article on this topic. Now, nearly a year later Microsoft won’t publicly disclose what patents are being infringed by Linux and other open-source programs. Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith was appearing earlier today at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco. Todd Bishop had a chance to speak to Smith on the phone about Microsoft’s reason for not listing what patents are being infringed upon: Will we publish, on the Web, a broader list? That is not something that any other company in…
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…
I’ve been using Windows Vista for about a month or so now. I ended up removing Norton on day one choosing to using Avast! and Zone Alarm. I been wanting to try out the new Comodo Firewall which recently became Vista compatible, however I have heard when used with Avast has a very adverse affect on Windows startup time. Up until the other day everything had been running fairly smoothly. I do have this occasional issue with Thunderbird and/or Firefox where I go run the application and it won’t run. Click again and either it still does nothing or I…