Yahoo! Mail to be improved

Yahoo! is about to add two more domain names to the form when you register for a Yahoo! Mail account: “rocketmail.com” and “ymail.com” (the second of which also goes directly to the Yahoo! Mail interface). This is being done in hopes that people will use Yahoo! Mail — still the world’s leading free e-mail service, with 2 million more users than Hotmail/Windows Live Mail and more than double the number of Gmail users.

Get away from those pesky and immature usernames, and grab a more decent e-mail address from Yahoo! starting 4 PM today.

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Rejected!

Apparently, Yahoo! has once again rejected Microsoft’s $40+ billion bid. They feel that it underestimates their company’s value.

Don’t forget, there are predictions that this deal will never go through on account of the European Union.

(3 votes, average: 3.67 out of 5)

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Impatient Microsoft

The following letter was composed by Steve Ballmer to the Yahoo! board:

April 5, 2008
Board of Directors
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089

Dear Members of the Board:

It has now been more than two months since we made our proposal to acquire Yahoo! at a 62% premium to its closing price on January 31, 2008, the day prior to our announcement. Our goal in making such a generous offer was to create the basis for a speedy and ultimately friendly transaction. Despite this, the pace of the last two months has been anything but speedy.

While there has been some limited interaction between management of our two companies, there has been no meaningful negotiation to conclude an agreement. We understand that you have been meeting to consider and assess your alternatives, including alternative transactions with others in the industry, but we’ve seen no indication that you have authorized Yahoo! management to negotiate with Microsoft. This is despite the fact that our proposal is the only alternative put forward that offers your shareholders full and fair value for their shares, gives every shareholder a vote on the future of the company, and enhances choice for content creators, advertisers, and consumers.

During these two months of inactivity, the Internet has continued to march on, while the public equity markets and overall economic conditions have weakened considerably, both in general and for other Internet-focused companies in particular. At the same time, public indicators suggest that Yahoo!’s search and page view shares have declined. Finally, you have adopted new plans at the company that have made any change of control more costly.

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, even after reviewing your public disclosures relating to your future prospects.

Given these developments, we believe now is the time for our respective companies to authorize teams to sit down and negotiate a definitive agreement on a combination of our companies that will deliver superior value to our respective shareholders, creating a more efficient and competitive company that will provide greater value and service to our customers. 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 substantial premium reflected in our initial proposal anticipated a friendly transaction with you. 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.

It is unfortunate that by choosing not to enter into substantive negotiations with us, you have failed to give due consideration to a transaction that has tremendous benefits for Yahoo!’s shareholders and employees. We think it is critically important not to let this window of opportunity pass.

Sincerely,

Steven A. Ballmer
Chief Executive Office
Microsoft Corp.

Yes, interesting, isn’t it?

“a friendly transaction” - hardly so. Suddenly offering more than 40 billion U.S. dollars without solicitation doesn’t seem very friendly to me. Furthermore, the threat that follows that phrase does not appear friendly.

“tremendous benefits” for shareholders, perhaps not for employees (many of whom will be fired to be replaced!). Not tremendous benefits for the general public and those who actually love Yahoo!

I, for one, hope that this deal is never completed. I hope that the E.U. will stop the merger. Even China has some influence that can prevent the purchase from being completed.

What are your thoughts?

(2 votes, average: 2.5 out of 5)

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OpenID enabled again!

It’s been a long time since I last allowed OpenID on this site. In fact, I disabled the OpenID plugin on Christmas Eve 2007. At that time, my reasoning was that the plugin added a great deal of JavaScript and additional CSS to the page. (I had complained that the size of a web page including stylesheets and JavaScript had increased to more than 60 kilobytes.)

It doesn’t seem to be much of a concern now. According to Safari’s Network Timeline tool (under the Develop menu), the homepage is now over 600 kilobytes including stylesheets and JavaScript, and it isn’t slow, even on lesser connection speeds. I’m still trying to optimize the site, but I guess having plugins like WP-PostRatings just add to the size of the site. (I don’t really like Prototype, jquery, and that sort of JavaScript library because they are bulky and require the whole thing to be loaded. The Yahoo! UI is a much better library.) However, to be honest, the biggest file size component is the graphics (screenshots and such), because they go over 300 KB.

Let’s talk about OpenID:

Yahoo! recently embraced OpenID, and the new version of the plugin that I’ve installed now supports using your Flickr page as an OpenID. It’s a nice, simple way of logging in to thousands of sites on the Internet. I have liked this concept for a very long time, and am now re-opening up the OpenID log-in and registration and comment authentication system. I believe that users shouldn’t have to register for all the sites they browse.

Let’s talk more about the site’s size:

Only 5 users over the past month have visited this site on dial-up. Understandably, using the site will be a horrible experience for dial-up users, but 5 users are not significant enough for any concern. I will therefore not aim to optimize the site for dial-up; my goal is to make it an enjoyable experience for users on 256+ kbps connections. The size of the home page (XHTML only) is about 50 KB, and the size of the stylesheets is only 11 KB. What is weighing down this site is the inefficient ITK Ranks scripting system, which has about 10 different complex JavaScript files in an unoptimized format, and the inefficient JavaScript used for ads. OpenID and PostRatings aren’t actually that bad.

To help minimize any pains of surfing our site, I will be optimizing the ad system and showing less banners on the site, opting for PHP rather than JavaScript invocation, and also trying external ad management like Adroll. (I remember taking banners off for a few weeks sometime early in 2007. That worked extremely well.)

A final word: what is really adding to the size of our site is images. I like using graphics to illustrate what I am saying, as opposed to text-only content. Realize, however, that if it weren’t for the images (particularly the resized pictures from Flickr, which is bad at image compression), this site would be only 100 KB, compressed. That’s pretty good for a modern blog. I will try to reduce the amount of resized pictures from Flickr. (The original pictures that I create are a lot smaller than the resized versions.)

Keep browsing our site, subscribe to our feed, submit our articles to your favourite social bookmarking sites (using the links below each post), and rate the posts!

(4 votes, average: 3.75 out of 5)

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Google acquires DoubleClick

Google has finally finished the purchase of DoubleClick for $3.1 billion after the E.U.’s antitrust regulators approved the deal. This signals a more aggressive move by Google into online advertising, and could provoke responses from Microsoft. However, this deal has somewhat boosted Google’s stock, by 6.3 percent on Tuesday.

It is possible that this deal will also influence the Microsoft-Yahoo! purchase.

(2 votes, average: 2 out of 5)

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Blu-Ray the winner, Microsoft fined $1.3 billion

By no means are the two related; Blu-Ray winning the format wars of 2007 (and a bit of 2008) has little to do with the E.U.’s judgement that Microsoft charged too much for interoperability.

Blu-Ray and HD-DVD have really been going at it, and with the withdrawal of their HD-DVD players from the market by Toshiba (the last manufacturer of HD-DVD players), HD-DVD is officially dead. There were so many benefits that I feel it had, but Sony had the PS3 with which they could BUNDLE another product.

By taking the risk and including a Blu-Ray drive in their PlayStation 3, Sony was able to push the Blu-Ray technology into more than a million homes in North America, and effectively leverage the appeal of one of their products (PlayStation) to introduce customers to another (Blu-Ray).

If this is sounding like what Microsoft did during the browser wars (after which they won), you’re right. There is the element of BUNDLING. But what Sony has done was not illegal under antitrust laws. (Until a lawyer can come along and prove me wrong by winning a lawsuit against Sony, I stand firmly behind that statement.) They do NOT have a monopoly in gaming consoles: Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are all dominant players, with the Xbox sales at the highest, and the Wii in hyped demand.

Since Sony did not make use of a monopoly to try and gain a monopoly in another field, they cannot be held culpable under law.

However, they did gain a monopoly: since Blu-Ray is effectively the only remaining high definition, large storage disc medium, it will surely dominate the field.

In other news…

Microsoft has been ordered by the European Commission to pay $1.3 billion (USD equivalent) in fines for failing to comply with a 2004 ruling until October 2007. Microsoft was requested to open its software and protocol specifications to other developers, but they have charged large sums for any use of the documents.

Recently, Microsoft has claimed that it will make available the official file format specifications of previously proprietary formats like .doc, .xls, and .ppt. Many are doubting whether or not they will actually do what they have claimed they will do.

There is nothing but contempt between Microsoft and the European Union. It doesn’t seem to be improving, and hopefully the European Commission can put a stop to the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal.

Will the EU fine change Microsoft? by ZDNet’s Dana Blankenhorn — I think Microsoft needs to undertake some diplomacy that will put a final, definitive line under all this. But what would you do if the EU fined you?

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