and then sat on all that cash somewhere on my own island.

Hell yeah.

To everyone who's complaining about the abuse of exclamation marks on Yahoo! Related! Stories!; get over it please. This site has been reporting Yahoo! News! for as long as I've been reading it (2001 I started) and if you're not used to some sillyness mixed in with the coverage you can go and read some stuffy highbrow nonsense...

What does Yahoo actually make money from? Except for advertising, that it. Everything I've seen from Yahoo seems to be free and apart from using an email address there, I don't deal with the company in an other way. Anyone shed light on what Yahoo make these millions from?

Well, obviously, they are not making money, or else they wouldn't have laid off all of those workers, and become a nice juicy take-over target for M$. I do have a theory about money-making: selling user profiles. They can probably get away with this in the shadier jurisdictions that yahoo has a presence. Also, nothing prevents a U.S. corporation from transferring user profiles to a wholly-owned foreign subsidiary of Yahoo (hey, it's just data), which then goes on to sell the data to another wholly-owned non-U.S. subsidiary of a global advertiser.

I have serious doubts that an M$-Yahoo! combined army could take on Google. But, hey, I'm generally cynical. Just as I saw the AMD/ATi merger as a serious mistake, I see this attempt by Microsoft to grab a piece of the web as a serious strategic blunder (although Vista is perhaps their worst, but thankfully not their last). It will distort M$ strategy, and even if they manage to merge with someone, what will they do? Take over the brand and fire everyone who ever worked for the previous company? If they don't, then they'll spend years integrating the other company. Large-scale mergers like this do not go well, historically.

Think Dalmier-Chrysler. I don't particularly care if I'm wrong. If M$ pulls this off, I'll be very surprised. Interesting times, indeed.

So Yahoo's being "undervalued by Microsoft"? Yahoo's share price only went up after the Microsoft offer. Anybody forget how Yahoo is laying off 1,000 staffers? Yahoo is in trouble. If you have Yahoo shares, sell them now while the stock price is up.

>Yahoo! is casting around for a white knight and is said by The Times to be "seeking to restart merger talk with Yahoo!"

Sounds a bit incestuous...

Personally, I hope M$ up the ante and spend themselves silly, as however much money they throw at Yahoo!, it's not going to turn them into Google. Still, I love the thought of Ballmer hurling* more furniture.

*The English definition, BTW. I don't think even SB could vomit chairs...

This takeover attempt is good for lawyers, accountants and Yahoo! shareholders, everyone else gets shafted. MS waste a fortune overpaying for Yahoo! and Yahoo! customers and employees will loose big-time. The most obvious winner will be Google who will pick up lots of talented Yahoo! staff and over time disaffected MS-Yahoo customer.

Obviously Yahoo!'s board have to refuse the first offer, if you are going to be bought you have to at least put up some resistance to push the price up. Given Microsoft's plunging share price, you also have to squeeze them for a better mix of cash to shares.

Anyone need a googlemail invite?

They've seen the "best" that Microsoft had to offer (Vista hehe) and don't want to be associated with them !

On a slightly related note, is this "takeover" not also a tacit admission that Microsoft can't code shit^H^H (cough) create a half decent search engine, and have to do their usual - buy a company that can ?

The exclamation marks remind me of the unwell kid in Malcolm in the Middle. Breathing between each word. Kinda makes me think of the whole thing as sick and unwell.