I disagree. Tell that to Lowe’s, Wells Fargo, HP, Chevron, or any one of thousands of companies earning record corporate profits without being the one key player.

If anything, the Internet with its still boundless growth has more opportunity than any other industry to support multiple profitable players in each service, be it search, content, ad distribution, or anything else. Who is the “key player” in browser technology — you say it’s Microsoft, but their market share is hardly dominant.

and at&t takeover of yahoo isn’t going to happen, i doubt anyone at the “table” (at&t, yahoo, all individual and institutional investors, the fcc) sees this as desirable. as big as they are, at&t must realize that yahoo competes in markets far too volatile for them to try to engage.

a google takeover of yahoo likewise makes little sense. google’s products outside of search are accreting users on their own merits, i doubt there is any real value to buying the competition, particularly in loss-leader categories like email.

maybe i would say microsoft, since yahoo would immediately push them into nontrivial relevance online and would help transform the company away from desktop and server software.

BUT, and this what what all you knuckleheads forget, no one gets bought for their current market cap. do you think yahoo will be bought for $40b because their market cap is $40b? there is going to be a serious premium to pay, yahoo would not be sold today for anything less than $80b. this is a company that is still growing, an acquiring party has to pay for that growth. any offer under $60b likely would be met with a phone hangup. $80b is serious cash for microsoft. at&t or google, certainly not a number to balk at.

ATT Yahoo subs get free access to CA’s desktop security product, Launchcast ‘plus’ music streaming, and a 2 gig yahoo mailbox without any ads. Many moons ago we used to get 5 free premium S&P stock reports per month but now those cost $25 each.

Nothing that most people wouldn’t miss.

But what will happen to existing customers who enjoy Yahoo services? Most of these services were free anyway, but I don’t think all were. Can anyone list premium Yahoo services that AT&T subscribers enjoyed?

i’m still looking for telecom with “do no evil” attitude.

NAZ market makers saw the dow jones story before market open and decided to mark it down for a gap down on the open this morning so it would trigger off a bunch of stop loss orders placed by nervous and weak willed longs, and a few momentum short sellers came in as well. MMs had to do something because legg mason is still buy up a ton of shares at a good price before the run up when panama revenue hits the books.

shakeouts typically happen on ‘bad news’….its the only way really.

this is one of the oldest games on the street.

yhoo will be higher very soon.
shorts made a few dollars today, but the big money is on the upside long-term.

btw, any of you aware of the bad blood between dow jones and yahoo?? all the other ‘news outlets’ got it from dow jones and then out their own spin on it.

(to the goog fanboys who actually use G finance instead of the vastly superior Y finance, you and your money will be easily parted…)

Why is everyone so hyped about Panama? It’s simply a better tool for ad creation than they had with Overture. However, it’s still not as good as AdWords. More importantly, it’s ad *distribution* not ad *creation* that matters. They’re losing the ad distribution battle. Lost AOL deal in 2002, MSN in 2006, now Friendster in 2007. Didn’t make deals in 2006 with MySpace, Youtube and Facebook while GOOG and MSFT did.

You know what they’re doing instead? They’re using parked domains and spyware as their ad distribution channels. They’re being cheap. Refusing to buy companies to secure distribution or pay for ad partnerships. They’re selling out their advertising base. At some point, this strategy is going to fail. Pretty lame. It’s the Sausage Manifesto and not the Peanut Butter Manifesto that will be YHOO’s problem in 2007. I’d like to hear meaningful discussions about the merits of the yahoosyndicationfraud.com class action than the Panama hype.

BTW, if anyone from Yahoo! happens to read TechCrunch, make sure there’s an option in Panama to choose only PPC ads on Yahoo! properties. With Google, you can opt out of both their search and content networks and only distribute ads to Google search. That’s the type of feature you “forgot” to emulate with the Y!SM upgrade. Think more about the ad distribution (both in terms of quality and quantity) now that the ad creation process has been improved.

http://news.yah...rg/aviphegnrn6g

And are blaming them for delays in IPTV roll-out:

http://media.se...m/article/25210

So maybe they are making a play to take the prize from MS? Talk about hardball.

The yahoo/verizon deal wouldn’t be in jeopardy because att dsl and verizon dsl don’t compete head to head in any meaningful manner. Having said that, I think VZ is sniffing around for a Google content/portal/marketing/cobranding deal anyway after they complete the buy out Vodafone’s share of VZW.

The WSJ article actually discusses a possible merger that y! reportedly blew off.

I’d rather see comcast acquire them while rolling out their MVNO business on the sprint network. That company is way too conservative about the telco’s move into their “protected space”.

Yahoo needs a social network like I need cancer. The company’s sliding with all the bullshit services that they’re overburdening themselves with. The final nail in the coffin will be the day they overpay for Facebook in a desperation hail mary.

I could also see Yahoo! as a good play for AT&T, but then that could scuttle their co-branding deal with Verizon.

If Yahoo! doesn’t want to be gobbled up by Google and doesn’t want to buy Facebook, and I’m not convinced they need Facebook to succeed (they just need a decent social networking and blogging platform that doesn’t suck so bad like Yahoo! 360 which they could get a lot cheaper in Six Apart Ltd.), they should do a merger of equals with eBay. The combined company could be called eBay Yahoo! Inc. As a side benefit, in determining the stock conversion calculations, they could use the opportunity to ensure they have substantially less outstanding shares post-merger than the two parts would have separately – without the expensive stock buyback or publicly embarrassing reverse stock-split.

So, I’d favour the last option, eBay Yahoo! Inc. Semel can save face and continue to serve as non-executive chair of the combined company; Meg Whitman can serve as CEO and Sue Decker gets President & COO.

What do you guys think?

Cheers,
Doug

And THAT ladies and gentleman would be the GOOG killer.

T – Market Cap: 228.22B
YHOO – Market Cap:39.50B

39.50 – 228.22 == 10 ???

Ed eats companies of YHOO size for breakfast.

Google owns online advertising.

MSN owns the browser and all your software (at least 90% of it) and can effortlessly direct users to their online properties.

Yahoo has a very popular email program, but this is not a significant source of revenue growth. Yahoo has other great online properties such as flickr and answers, but these aren’t huge income producers.