In an open letter to the Yahoo board of directors, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer accused the company of avoiding serious negotiations over its February 1 offer and warned that any further delays could result in a less attractive offer for Yahoo.

“We believe now is the time for our respective companies to authorize teams to sit down and negotiate a definitive agreement,” Ballmer said in the letter, which was posted on Microsoft’s website.

“If we have not concluded an agreement within the next three weeks, we will be compelled to take our case directly to your shareholders, including the initiation of a proxy contest to elect an alternative slate of directors for the Yahoo board.”

The was no immediate response from Yahoo to Ballmer’s letter, which came in the wake of a reported meeting earlier this week between officials of the two companies.

The ultimatum was issued two months after the software giant’s unsolicited offer of 31 dollars a share for Yahoo, a 62-percent premium on Yahoo’s share price at the time.

Microsoft hopes that by taking over Yahoo, it can gain ground on Google’s overwhelming dominance of the lucrative Internet advertising business.

Yahoo, Google’s closest competitor, has steadily lost market share in the business, leaving it vulnerable to cash-rich Microsoft’s takeover effort.

But Yahoo rejected the offer, at first searching for a possible white knight partner — Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp was considered — to help fend off Microsoft, and then undertaking moves like postponing a deadline to nominate new directors to the Yahoo board to stall the bid.

On March 18 it said Yahoo was worth at least 40 dollars share — 10 billion dollars higher than Microsoft’s offer — and announced that it has a new three-year financial and strategic plan to restore cash flow and boost profits.

“Yahoo is positioned for accelerated financial growth — we have a powerful consumer brand, a huge global audience and a highly profitable operating model,” chief executive Jerry Yang said in a statement at the time.

“Yahoo is poised to capture growth in display advertising where we believe growth will be greatest.”

But Ballmer said in his letter Saturday that the US economic slump and sagging stock market, if anything, had hurt Yahoo’s value.

In addition, he said, “public indicators suggest that Yahoo’s search and page view shares have declined.”

He also accused Yahoo’s board of avoiding serious discussions and of adopting plans that will raise the cost of Microsoft’s takeover.

“By any fair measure, the large premium we offered in January is even more significant today. We believe that the majority of your shareholders share this assessment,” he said.

“If we are forced to take an offer directly to your shareholders, that action will have an undesirable impact on the value of your company from our perspective which will be reflected in the terms of our proposal,” the letter said.

“We think it is critically important not to let this window of opportunity pass.”

© Copyright AFP Agence France-Presse GmbH - All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or distributed. All reproduction or redistribution is expressly forbidden without the prior written agreement of AFP.

Google may eventually be displaced as the pre-eminent brand on the internet by a  company that harnesses the power of next-generation web technology, the inventor of the World Wide Web has said.The search giant had developed an extremely effective way of searching for pages on the internet, Tim Berners-Lee said, but that ability paled in Comparison to what could be achieved on the “web of the future”, which he said would allow any piece of information & such as a photo or a bank statement to be linked to any other.Mr Berners-Lee said that in the same way, the “current craze” forsocial networking sites like Facebook and MySpace would eventually be superseded by networks that connected all types of things not just people thanks to a ground-breaking technology known as the “semantic web”.The semantic web is the term used by the computer and internet industry to describe the next phase of the web’s development, and essentially involves building web-based connectivity into any piece of data not just a web page so that it can “communicate” with other information.
Source Times Online

If the “hostile” take over of Yahoo my Microsoft gets too bogged down, with take over numbers that would cripple Microsoft and yahoo for years, this could be the best thing that ever happened to Google. And while Google’s public comments are “NO!”, in reality the board has to be watching this one play out.

If Yahoo succeeds in getting Microsoft to over commit (like at 41 dollars a share), and can get Microsoft to commit to some bad money management (going from surplus to deficit in slowing economy) then Microsoft will be so busy focusing on internal issues, integration issues, and other problems that the company will basically be resting while it digests Yahoo.

Google could not ask for more. This would give Google the chance to really settle into the front runners position, and make the combined MicroHoo fairly useless along the way.

Read the full story over on Techwag

Yahoo was said to be prparing to reject microsoft bid as news as it yahoo feels the offer greatly undervalue yahoo.
On February 1 Microsoft unveiled its 44.6 billion dollar offer to take over Yahoo, in an effort to merge the world’s biggest software company with a major Internet player to take on search and advertising juggernaut Google.

Microsoft proposed 31 dollars per share to Yahoo’s board, a 62 percent premium above its closing price the previous day.

Microsoft said a combination of the companies would lead to cost savings of a billion dollars per year.

But Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang sent a message to employees on Wednesday, assuring them the firm’s leaders were exploring ways to avoid a Microsoft takeover.

“Our board is thoughtfully evaluating a wide range of potential strategic alternatives in what is a complex and evolving landscape,” Yang wrote in the email.

“What’s become clear in the past few days is how much people care about this company. I’ve heard from many of you, and from other friends and colleagues from around Silicon Valley and across the globe, that we need to do what’s best for Yahoo and our shareholders.”

Google earlier condemned Microsoft’s effort as an attack on the very independence of the Internet.

SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp offered to buy Yahoo Inc for $44.6 billion (22.4 billion pound), in a bold bid to transform two ailing Internet businesses into a worthy competitor for market leader Google Inc.

In what would be the biggest Internet deal since the ill-fated Time Warner-AOL merger, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer sent a letter to Yahoo’s board on Thursday night to offer $31 per share in cash and stock.

The price is a 62 percent premium over Yahoo’s Thursday close, but only about a quarter of what the Internet company was worth at the height of the dotcom bubble in 2000.

Yahoo would give Microsoft dominance in Web banner ads used by corporate brand advertisers. It also attracts more than 500 million people monthly to sites devoted to news, finance and sports, and Yahoo Mail is the No. 1 consumer e-mail service.

The shares of Microsoft, which has a market capitalization of about $300 billion, fell 6.6 percent as some investors worried the world’s top software maker may be overpaying for Yahoo and could have a hard time getting a return on its investment.

Critics say the two companies have too many overlapping businesses — from instant messaging to email and advertising, as well as news, travel and finance sites — and both are weak in the Web search market, where Google dominates.

“They have to do it because they’ve tried everything they can do to fix MSN. Yahoo is the most visited site in the world, so it goes without saying that, given the current valuation, this is the perfect time for them to buy it,” said Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster.

But he added: “Google is running away with the search market and that’s obviously the best part of the market. The likelihood that Google gets caught is slim to none.”

Yahoo said on Friday its board will evaluate the unsolicited offer. Its shares shot up about 48 percent to $28.33. The shares of Google, which has a market value of about $160 billion, fell 8.58 percent to close at $515.90.

TRANSFORMATIVE OR CULTURE CLASH?

Speculation about a Microsoft-Yahoo deal has swirled through the markets for more than a year, as investors looked for a joint stand against the ever more powerful Google.

Google’s share of the U.S. Web search market rose to 58.4 percent by December from 52.6 percent in January last year, while Yahoo’s fell to 22.9 percent from 26.9 percent, and Microsoft’s fell to 9.8 percent from 10.4 percent, according to comScore data.

Sceptics say Microsoft and Yahoo have very different corporate cultures and worry about a clash such as the one that marred AOL’s $182 billion purchase of Time Warner in 2001, which is seen as the worst merger in recent history. Time Warner Inc is now valued at only $57 billion.

The perception is that Yahoo, an iconic Silicon Valley company with a free-flowing, fun-loving attitude, may not fit in with the button-up, competitive Microsoft, the world’s biggest software maker.

“Culture is the big thing where people have some concerns,” said Jupiter Research analyst Bobby Tulsiani. “If they have anything in common, they’re both tired of losing to Google, so they can agree on that probably.”

CEO Ballmer, in his most aggressive move to shape the future Microsoft, said the deal would transform its money-losing Internet division, which it sees as critical to growth, into a profitable pillar of its business.

“We have been losing money. Our plan here would be to not lose money in the future,” he said on a conference call.

Ballmer said Microsoft has had on-and-off talks with Yahoo for 18 months, but was told by management a year ago that the timing was not right — in an apparent reference to Yahoo’s then Chairman and Chief Executive Terry Semel.

Full Story

Wordpress continues to improve and after all the had and dedicated work they have done and the amount of hours they put in the wordpress application now is 2008 it is only fair to say champange up to all the members of the team and guys keep up the good work i must say since using wp i really enjoy it and can feel the power of the script.

News over on TechcrunchThat Rich Skrenta is about to launch a new search engine to challenge Google is a bit of a big statement seeing that yahoo and microsoft with all the resources were not able to gain much of the search engine marketing share from google which now enjoys the majority of the share. Rich Skrenta believes that google kills the internet with page ranks and google will go down with it..Full story here

Jorn Barger of Robot Wisdom coined the term “weblog” Dec. 17, 1997 — 10 years ago Monday — to describe the daily list of links that “logged” his travels across the web.

In the decade hence, Barger feels that he’s gained some wisdom of his own about blogging. Here’s Barger’s top 10 tips for novice bloggers:

My intent for weblogs in 1997 was to make the web as a whole more transparent, via a sort of
“mesh network,” where each weblog amplifies just those signals (or links) its author likes best. 1998-1999 was for me the Golden Age of Weblogs, when the following principles were widely understood:

1. A true weblog is a log of all the URLs you want to save or share. (So del.icio.us is actually better for blogging than blogger.com.)

2. You can certainly include links to your original thoughts, posted elsewhere … but if you have more original posts than links, you probably need to learn some humility.

3. If you spend a little time searching before you post, you can probably find your idea well articulated elsewhere already.

4. Being truly yourself is always hipper than suppressing a link just because it’s not trendy enough. Your readers need to get to know you.

5. You can always improve on the author’s own page title, when describing a link. (At least make sure your description is full enough that readers will recognize any pages they’ve already visited, without having to visit them again.)

6. Always include some adjective describing your own reaction to the linked page (great, useful, imaginative, clever, etc.)

7. Credit the source that led you to it, so your readers have the option of “moving upstream.”

8. Warn about “gotchas” — weird formatting, multipage stories, extra-long files, etc. Don’t camouflage the main link among unneeded (or poorly labeled) auxiliary links.

9. Pick some favorite authors or celebrities and create a Google News feed that tracks new mentions of them, so other fans can follow them via your weblog.

10. Re-post your favorite links from time to time, for people who missed them the first time.
Original Post by Original Blogger –Jorn Barger

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