Microsoft Yahoo Merger

Microsoft Yahoo Merger

Introduction

Yahoo! was founded in 1994, incorporated in 1995, and is based in Sunnyvale, California. This company was founded by two Stanford students, David Filo and Jerry Yang; first being called “Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web”. (Yahoo.com, 2008) The exclamation mark was added to get trademark rights. Yahoo! was started to amuse the two college graduate students; they wanted to have fun.

Yahoo! is mainly an internet portal. In a short span of time, Yahoo! has become a massive messaging and chat center of the world, especially internationally. Yahoo! is the chat and information center for most of the world. The United States of America is the only country that Yahoo! is not #1, second to only Google.

Yahoo! is the number one visited website worldwide and the second most popular in the United States.

The House of Foreign Affairs said that Yahoo! was deceptive and negligent in their actions. Legal proceedings are still pending, seeing there were many others that were arrested due to these emails. (Anderson, 2007)Yahoo! has and is suffering from their actions of handing the emails over to the Chinese Government. Yahoo! might have been wrong morally and legally by US laws, but they have a business in China and are bound in that country for following their rules. It does seem, thought, that Yahoo! gets to pick and choose what laws and customs they will follow in Asian countries. Yahoo! was looked down upon by Japan for having medicines and other things made with shark on their advertisements in Japan's Yahoo!. Yahoo! responded by saying it is custom, but there have been other facts shown to them that are saying it is really not a custom and is not really frowned against any longer.

Microsoft Corp., lagging behind Google Inc. in the online advertising market, is in talks to purchase a stake of as much as 5 percent in social-networking site Facebook Inc.

The investment may be $300 million to $500 million, giving Facebook an overall value of $10 billion, the newspaper reported on its website, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter. The talks are still preliminary, and Google has also expressed interest.

For Facebook, the talks come about one year after a proposed deal with Yahoo collapsed. Facebook then was said to be seeking more than the $1.65 billion Google paid for YouTube - and considerably more than the $580 million News Corp. paid for MySpace in 2005.

This move by Microsoft will help bring the software giant further into the realms of the internet. While already synonymous with operating systems and office productivity software, the company hasn't really taken off in areas that rival Google has exceeded in. Investing in Facebook will offer a jump-off platform to get new online software out to the public. There has already been cases of developers selling their applications after they've become popular on Facebook.

News of the talks between Microsoft and Facebook came on the heels of reports of a high-level, confidential meeting at Google on Friday ...