Yahoo Inc.'s biggest shareholders may not demand that Microsoft raise its $44.6 billion takeover offer because there is more to lose from a decline in their holdings of the buyer, Friedman Billings Ramsey Group Inc. said.
Eighteen of Yahoo's top 25 outside holders own even more Microsoft stock, FBR analysts including David Hilal said in a research note Wednesday. A $3 a share, or $4 billion, increase in the offer probably would reduce the value of each Microsoft share by at least 68 cents, enough to cancel those investors' gains from Yahoo, the analysts wrote.
Microsoft this week is giving a sneak peek at new Live services and platform development tools it plans to introduce at the company's MIX08 Web developers conference next week.
"We've got some cool new applications and APIs were unveiling at MIX08," David Treadwell, corporate vice president of Microsofts Live Platform Services group, said in a blog post Wednesday evening.
MIX is Microsoft's annual confab for Web developers and designers. This year's event, which runs next Wednesday through Friday, is being held in the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas as usual.
Microsoft's big bet on the online social network Facebook isn't stopping Chairman Bill Gates from promoting other popular Internet hangouts.
Gates is helping out LinkedIn's online professional network by setting up a profile on the service and posing a question to help draw more attention to a makeover of the Web site's front page.
The question, scheduled to be posted Thursday, will solicit suggestions on the best way to encourage more young people to pursue careers in science and technology.
Even some of Microsoft's top officials struggled to make Windows Vista work smoothly when it was released, according to internal e-mails released Wednesday.
To read the unsealed Microsoft e-mails, see goto.seattlepi.com/r1289
The messages, unsealed in a lawsuit against the company, show that Vista's early problems with hardware and software compatibility affected more than just average PC users. The e-mails also illustrate how the company will try to avoid such issues in the next Windows release.
And that will be great news for the 17 people who buy Windows that way each year. Microsoft announced yesterday that it will be cutting the price of the retail boxed versions of Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate by 20 to 48 percent. (They don't actually specify what the new prices are, however.) The price cuts will take place concurrently with the release of integrated versions of Windows Vista and Service Pack 1 (SP1), Microsoft says, which will happen by the middle of 2008. Here's the thing: This doesn't affect much at all. Retail versions of Windows have always amounted to less than 5 percent of all Windows licenses sold, so it's unclear whether this change will make much of a difference to consumers or Microsoft. And it certainly doesn't affect the prices of the versions of Windows people really do buy, whether they're bundled with new PCs or sold to corporations as licenses.
Along with Bill Gates, Microsoft may be hailing the departure of a mindset and a culture that's fixated on extending its hold on the pipeline of information. At least that's how Steve Ballmer presented his company yesterday.
The post-Gates era of Microsoft is already showing signs of a material difference in the company's objectives and its core message. During yesterday's keynote address for the company's single-day "Heroes Happen Here" launch event, CEO Steve Ballmer presented fewer of the meandering metaphors and enumerated participles that spawn, most obviously, from Bill Gates' mode of speech. And gone was any hint of the almost apelike stance Ballmer took during his famous "Developers, developers, developers" rant of years ago -- though it still managed to populate the screens of show visitors even yesterday, thanks to YouTube.
At this week's Digital Music Forum, lawyers managing digital rights for Microsoft's Zune music download site and RealNetworks' Rhapsody said that they too believe digital rights management to be more of a headache than an asset. Few would argue that consumers truly like dealing with digital rights management. But attorneys for big music download sites like Microsoft's Zunes and RealNetworks' Rhapsody aren't all that thrilled with managing digital rights, either.
During Wednesday's launch of Windows Server 2008, storage vendors turned out in full force, including CA, FalconStor Software, Emulex, EMC, Network Appliance, and QLogic.
Like others, Symantec wants to take advantage of the sales opportunity presented by Microsoft's Windows Server 2008, of which
IDC forecasts 3.5 million copies will be sold this year.
"We have to have a solution from day one," said Roger Blomqvist, senior principal technical product manager at Symantec. "That's
an opportunity we can't afford to miss."
Symantec Backup Exec, CA ARCserve, and FalconStor Message Recovery for Exchange have all been certified for the new operating system.
For a man who just got fined more than a billion dollars for antitrust violations, Steve Ballmer is feeling plenty of competitive heat.
In an interview, the Microsoft CEO pointed to tough competitors in every part of the business. Longtime foes like Oracle and IBM remain, but Google, Apple, and Linux all loom large.
Against that backdrop, Microsoft is locked in a protracted battle to acquire Yahoo. Ballmer spoke to CNET News.com shortly after the launch of new server software in Los Angeles.
In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday, Yahoo said that seven shareholder groups have filed lawsuits against the company's board of directors since Microsoft announced its unsolicited bid to take over the company.
The class action lawsuits charge that Yahoo's board has breached its fiduciary duty to the shareholders in its response to Microsoft's offer of $31 per share. The lawsuits are a sign of growing pressure on the company to come forward with a plan to restore value to the slumping Internet giant.