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While reporting it’s third quarter earnings Thursday, MICROSOFT reminded the world that Saturday would be the cutoff date for its acquisition of YAHOO. Earlier in the week YAHOO CEO Jerry Yang said the company will not accept a deal that undermines it’s full value, to which MICROSOFT’s CFO Chris Lidell replied that MICROSOFT had yet to see evidence that their bid of $31/share undermines YAHOO’s true value. Saturday MICROSOFT will either withdraws its bid, or break out the artillary for a hostile takeover.
Meanwhile, YAHOO plans to revamp itself by incorporating aspects of social networking, including widgets and other open source applications, by the end of the year. The plan coincided with the announcement of a 3-year advertising and content sharing deal with tech news site CNET. Of course, CEO Ari Balogh’s strategy for revitalizing the struggling company could all be done away with if a hostile takeover by Microsoft occurs this weekend.
Back in Washington, the JUSTICE DEPT. is investigating the YAHOO-GOOGLE Ad Wordsdeal. In a two-week trial YAHOO has been listing GOOGLE ad words alongside search results. The Justice Dept. is concerned that the trial basis may violate anti-trust laws and could affect Microsoft’s unsolicited takeover bid. The test is part of a series of efforts to thwart Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo.
COMSCORE was sort of right about GOOGLE’s paid clicks. CEO Dr. Magib Abraham fired back yesterday after Google took shots at comScore, claiming that the third party data misrepresented Google’s paid search advertising market. However, comScore was right, in that they reported solely on Google’s domestic paid click data. There are plenty of holes in the data as it does not account for paid clicks via partner sites, change in cost per click, or Google’s AdSense network. The important thing to remember is to not to rely on one source for all your information.
TOSHIBA’s net profits plunged 95%, mainly due to Blue Ray defeating its HD DVD product to become the high def optical disc standard. Last year Toshiba reported a ¥26.17B in profit, which fell to about ¥1.25B, $12 million. Tough luck for the manufacturer, but great news for consumers who finally get a high-def disc standard.