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rumormonger
Microsoft-Yahoo-AOL threesome just a sad, sad fantasy
The fantasy that someone will buy AOL from Time Warner in a complicated deal is getting even AOL CEO Randy Falco hot and bothered. A tipster told Silicon Alley Insider that Falco recently fumed, "When is New York going to sell us?" And to whom? "Sources close to AOL" told VentureBeat's Matt Marshall that Microsoft plans to aquire both Yahoo and AOL after those companies merge. We planned to give you a 100-word version of Marshall's story, but seven paragraphs in, we realized it made no sense. More »
stocks
Forget Yahoo, Microsoft buys more Microsoft
Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo for around $40 billion. That didn't work. Microsoft now plans to spend that much buying back stock, while it also increases its shareholder dividend by 18 percent. The company will take on as much as $6 billion in debt to pay for the buyback, which seems to rule out any major acquisition in the near term. Conveniently, the buyback also helps Microsoft founder Bill Gates with one of his biggest problems: selling his $20.3 billion stake in Microsoft in order to fund his nonprofit without killing the company's stock price. More »
hires
You don't have to be crazy to join Yahoo right now -- it just helps
Earlier this year, MSN exec Jeff Dossett climbed to the summit of Mount Everest in order to bring attention to the problem of AIDS and HIV in Africa. But now he's doing something really crazy. Dossett quit Microsoft last week and likely plans to join Yahoo, BoomTown reports. BoomTown's Kara Swisher notes that Dossett might be going because he's an old friend of fellow ex-Microsoft exec and new Yahoo exec Joanne Bradford. It's unclear what Dossett will do at Yahoo. At MSN, Dossett's job description labeled him as "the lead for audience, content and programming strategy and execution in the U.S," but apparently that was just his latest gig in a long line of online sales and strategy positions.Update: Dossett is not actually leaving Microsoft at all, Valleywag has now learned. That'd be crazy.
email
Yahoo dominates Sarah Palin's email contact list
Sometimes I hear people ask: "Who uses Yahoo Mail anymore?" The answer, of course, is just about everybody. ComScore puts the number at around 260 million people — far more than Google's 90 million. But statistics can feel abstract. Now that a 4chan reprobate has hacked into Alaska governor and "average hockey mom" Sarah Palin's private Yahoo email account and discovered, among other things, her contact list, we have a more concrete demonstration of Yahoo's dominance of Palin's decidedly down-home demographic. Here is a list contains six Yahoo addresses, an AOL address, a Hotmail address and exactly zero Gmail addresses. More »
rumormonger
Top Yahoo brain snubs Facebook for Microsoft
Qi Lu, Yahoo's top search scientist, has been rumored to be leaving the company since June. But he's only just recently disappeared from Yahoo's list of top executives. We hear he's taking a job at Microsoft. Microsoft, the land where Web talent goes to die? More »
search
The search engine wars in rhythm and rhyme
Pantless Knights Productions, the folks who brought you last year's sketch rap hit "Mac or PC," have released a new project — the Search Engine Rap Battle. Think Eminem's 8 Mile but with MC avatars for Microsoft, Yahoo and Google. Some of the rhymes, like MSN's takedown of Google at the end of the clip after the jump, are actually hilarious: "You might have users, but they'll soon be leavin ya / Cuz your search results say search Wikipedia." Even better are the costumes: Live Search in a skintight butterfly unitard, the Google propellerhead on a Segway and a rootin', tootin' cowboy from Yahoo. Instead of bribing people to use and promote Live Search or spending $300 million on meaningless television ads to "start a new kind of conversation," Microsoft should just hire these kids. More »
acquisitions
Electronic Arts gives Take-Two shareholders the Yahoo flu
Take-Two Interactive, the marketer of Grand Theft Auto and various sports videogames, has watched its stock price plummet to $16.99 on the news that Electronic Arts has decided to quit trying to buy the company for $26 a share. Much like Yahoo's drop after Microsoft took an offer off the table, Take-Two's shares are headed south of where they were when EA initially made an offer. I'm counting the days until a third company meets the same fate and I get to write the obligatory trend piece.
stocks
10 tech stocks to watch as Lehman disappears and AIG totters
When it became obvious over the weekend that investment bank Lehman Brothers would finally fail and that no one was going to rescue it, Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain realized the market's reaction today would tank his company as well. So Thain met with Kenneth Lewis, CEO of Bank of America, and the pair reached a deal to sell Merrill Lynch to Bank of America for $44 billion. Which is, you might recall, around the price Microsoft wanted to pay for Yahoo. Of course, that kind of offer won't be coming for Yahoo again any time soon. While not so severely or directly, Lehman Brothers' collapse and insurance giant AIG's tottering on the brink will affect your tech portfolio today. Before this morning's open the company's stock was already down 3.83 percent on premarket trading. Watch Yahoo and nine other tech stock's continuing destruction or — dare you hope? — miraculous resilience on live stock charts below. More »
antitrust
