Ballmer
Microsoft to Yahoo: Not Interested
Things are starting to look really, really sad for Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang. First, Google leaves him at the altar of their search advertising deal, rendering him without a mighty groom to fend off a Microsoft takeover.
Next, he suddenly changes his mind in favor of a Microsoft takeover, denying everything he fought for through most of the year.
Now, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer puts another nail in the coffin of Yang’s Christmas.
Speaking at a Committee for Economic Development of Australia lunch in Sydney on Friday, Ballmer said: “Look, we made an offer, we made another offer. It was clear that Yahoo didn’t want to sell the business to us, and we moved on.”
Ballmer said other deals with Yahoo had also been unsuccessful. “We tried at one point to do a partnership around search, not advertising. That didn’t work either, so we moved on, and they moved on.”
“We are not interested in going back and re-looking at an acquisition,” he said. “I don’t know why they would be either, frankly.”
When discussing the failed takeover, which if successful would have been one of the biggest takeovers in IT history, Ballmer said “they turned us down at $33 a share, move on.”
What’s worse than throwing away your dignity as founder of the world’s second largest Internet giant? Having it thrown back at you by the twenty-fourth employee of the third largest Internet giant.
Microsoft: Be Funny, But Sell Something
Now that Microsoft is dropping their utterly pointless Seinfeld ads, perhaps they can learn to make a point while still being funny. Pointlessness may be the hallmark of Seinfeld’s humor, but advertising shouldn’t be pointless, and humor doesn’t have to be pointless. Take for instance the Mac switch ad parodies by TrueNuff. They make me glad I’m not a Mac fanboy.
That takes care of the consumer market. What about the enterprise market, where Microsoft has a huge stake? You can use pointed humor there, too. For years, IBM ads have made enterprise computing hilarious. Click here to continue reading “Microsoft: Be Funny, But Sell Something”…
