News: May 2008 Archives

I had brunch with a friend who works at Yahoo!, and as we talked I realized I had missed the significance of Y!OS.  Per Neal Sample "Yahoo! serves more than 500 million unique users every month. We serve 120 billion page views per month. Yahoo! users spend 235 billion minutes a month on our sites. More importantly, some 10 billion relationships exist on user buddy lists and in Yahoo! address books. All that represents a mind-boggling audience for developers."

The key here is that as a part of Y!OS Yahoo! will open up the "connections" created by the mail address book and messenger buddy lists (as well as their social networking services) to the developers.  That's huge.

In order to do that, Yahoo! has homework to do - they are rewiring their data internally.  Their CTO says: "We are not creating another social network. We will rewire the entire experience to make it social. We don't think of social as a destination but as a dimension."

This is a unique opportunity for the developers...

Microsoft announced Live Mesh, a backup and synchronization service in the cloud, and more importantly along with the announcement Ray Ozzie distributed a new strategy document which outlines how Microsoft is going to shift its attention from PC software to the "mesh", as in "connecting" people and devices on the web. See full text of Ozzie's Strategy in PDF.

Seattle based wiki/social networks startup Wetpaint has raised their third round of financing of $25M, bringing the total amount of capital raised to nearly $40 million: Why WetPaint & Other UGC Sites Get Big Money - GigaOM

Carl Icahn has been busy:

I have therefore taken the following actions: (1) during the last 10 days, I have purchased approximately 59 million shares and share-equivalents of Yahoo; (2) I have formed a 10-person slate which will stand for election against the current board; and (3) I have sought antitrust clearance from the Federal Trade Commission to acquire up to approximately $2.5 billion worth of Yahoo stock.

Here's the complete text of letter to Yahoo!.

Yesterday I walked to our little front yard where my wife was gardening:  "Latest News:  The deal is off".  She looked at me for a few seconds, wondering which deal I was talking about, and then a big grin appeared on her face. "So what about Microsoft going hostile?  They said they'd do it."  And I explained to her that they could not agree on the price - Microsft at $33 and Yahoo! at $37 - and Yahoo!'s stand is that if Microsoft goes hostile Yahoo! will do a bigger deal with Google.  That's something Microsoft is very concerened about, and therefore Steve Balmer in his letter has asserted that they won't go hostile.

So, finally.  I guess market and financials aside, a lot of people were emotionally involved in this drama, not wanting Yahoo! to be taken over by Redmond.

A good summary of everything can be found on TechCrunch.