Guild Wars Sells Five Million

Two nights ago, I stood at the exact spot where my first Guild Wars character spawned almost three years ago. I was delighted to find new characters just keep on spawning at that exact same spot, ready to discover the game anew.

That’s why I’m delighted to hear that, as of today, Guild Wars has sold over five million units. Sure, it doesn’t have World of Warcraft’s ten million subscribers, but I’ve never been one to go with the crowd. Guild Wars’ highly modular gameplay lets even a busy guy like me play an online RPG. Congratulations to ArenaNet on serving gorgeously immersive experiences to millions of busy gamers.

Bill Gates Wants Yahoo’s People. The Feeling isn’t Mutual.

This is the funniest thing I’ve heard all week.

Bill Gates is willing to pay a lot for engineering talent.

Asked what makes Yahoo worth more than $40 billion, Gates pointed not to the company’s products, its huge base of advertisers, or its market share, but rather to Yahoo’s engineers. Those people, he said, are what Microsoft needs to go after Google.

In an interview after his speech at Stanford University, Gates said that it turns out it takes a lot of manpower to build tools for advertisers, mobile, and video products as well as improving its core search algorithm and building an infrastructure for cloud computing. “The amount of computer science it is taking to do that is phenomenal,” he said. “As you get more scale of engineering you can just pursue that agenda more rapidly. Yes, the advertisers and the number of end users is good, but we’d put the people and the engineering as the key thing.”

Bill, what the Hell are you talking about? Yahoo employees hate your guts! No matter how great their engineers are, they just won’t work for you!

“Yahoo has always considered itself a bit of an upstart,” says a former Yahoo employee who asked to remain anonymous. “Most Yahoo employees will feel that, A., we lost, and B., there is no way in hell that I am going to work for Microsoft.”

Even if Microsoft buys Yahoo, Yahoo’s best engineers could follow the well-respected Brad Horowitz to Google. In a cruel twist of fate, Google could end up getting the very engineers Bill wanted out of the purchase. Ballmer could end up needing a lot more chairs.

After watching this clip from Pirates of Silicon Valley, it occurs to me that Bill is probably lying about his motivations. He really wants Yahoo for its advertisers and users. All his talk about valuing Yahoo’s engineers is just a ploy to lower resistance to a merger.

Either way, it won’t work. Genuine or fake, Bill’s lust for Yahoo’s people is not mutual.