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Filed under: Deals, Competitive strategy, Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo! (YHOO), Employees

With the announcement of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT)’s $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO), the real courting process is about to begin.

As I predicted back in July 2007, this “affair” had to happen if Microsoft was ever going to be serious in challenging Google (NASDAQ: GOOG)’s reign in the lucrative search engine world. Looking at October 2007 data from comScore — the independent scorekeeper in the search world — Google was actually widening its dominance. Explain please!

There were 55.3 billion search queries worldwide during the month of October. Google handled 42.4 billion of these queries, while 2.1 billion were directed to Microsoft and Yahoo! handled 10.8 billion — or a total of one-quarter of Google searches. Worldwide growth was 56% year-over-year for the industry, while Google’s annual growth alone was 81%. The message: Google was taking market share at the expense of Microsoft and Yahoo!. Coupled with its current disappointing guidance for 2008, Yahoo! had no choice but to hook up with Microsoft, and the opportunity for Microsoft was now. That’s all well and good, but now what happens?

Yahoo! is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., just south of San Francisco, while Microsoft is 1,000 miles north in the Seattle area. The 1,000 miles is also the gap in their respective corporate cultures. Microsoft will do almost anything now to retain the key, strategic Yahoo! employees. Culturally, Microsoft versus Yahoo! is like the stiff-upper-lipped British “gentleman” meeting a reformed 1960s hippie. Microsoft I know would disagree, but visit both campuses and the differences are rather pronounced.

Yahoo! already announced the head-count reduction of 1,000 people from its 11,000-person workforce, and Microsoft mentioned a $1 billion worth of “synergies” once the transaction closes. “Synergies” in Silicon Valley means more head-count reductions. But more importantly, key Yahoo personnel not scheduled for layoffs will begin to feel suspicious. Will key positions be in Sunnyvale or in Redmond, Washington? Will my new boss wear a Microsoft hat rather than a Yahoo! hat? Will I be able to park my bike here on campus for free? Will the coffee remain free? Can I still create to my heart’s content?

These are the types of questions that run through the brilliant minds of technology geeks. Microsoft will not close the Yahoo! transaction for about six months. The ensuing six to nine months will tell the tale if Microsoft is capable of absorbing such a big acquisition. The Microsoft acquisition of aQuantive went smoothly — so far — as aQuantive is only five miles away and key senior managers were kept in place. This Yahoo! purchase is about eight times bigger, but Yahoo! was also a direct competitor to Microsoft. aQuantive was a totally new technology for Microsoft, so they had to retain the key players.

Microsoft has yet to detail what “synergies” really means. Who stays and who goes? What about Yahoo! CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang — what’s his REAL new role going to entail? Right now, Jerry must be kept happy.

Large acquisitions rarely go without major disruptions and surprises. The biggest surprise here may be Yahoo! employees “taking it easy” these next three to six months. The attitude of “we now have a deep pocketed parent” might permeate, and Yahoo!’s senior management will be more focused on the acquisition process than the business building process.

The real opportunity here may be for Google. Google may prove to be the biggest winner of all in this proposed deal. More on why this move is to Google’s advantage in my next article … stay tuned.

Georges Yared writes about finding great growth stocks today in GameOn Investing.

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Filed under: Business, Fun, Utilities, Troubleshooting

For bloggers or anyone who wants their own website, a natural question always is - who should I choose for a web host? There are lots of guides and ways to get advice on this subject. But the fact is that choosing the cheapest isn’t always the best. If you know someone who has a site and you’re impressed with the speed and uptime of that site, it might be beneficial to know who their web host is.

Finding out is simple with a great website called WhoIsHostingThis. When you visit the site, there’s a simple box where you type the name of any site, hit “Tell Me”, and the internet host is revealed. Very cool.

We appreciate that WhoIsHostingThis doesn’t require registration. Additionally, there’s no annoying Flash ads (yet) or any other factors that drive us nuts when browsing the internet.

This is a very practical website to add to your web toolbox.

[via MakeUseOf]

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Candidates battle not just for votes, but also for donor’s dollars. Explore who has the most, who’s spent the least and who keeps the most cash on hand.

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Filed under: Other issues, Deals, BHP Billiton Ltd ADR (BHP), Commodities

Alcoa and Aluminum Corp. of China, known as Chinalco, have jointly acquired a 12% stake in Rio Tinto, Alcoa announced Friday, in a statement.

The deal is estimated to be worth $14.05 billion, and represents the largest overseas investment by a Chinese company, Chinalco said. Alcoa Inc. (NYSE: AA) stated it would contribute $1.2 billion to the investment.

Alcoa’s shares closed Friday up $1.19 to $34.15 on the news, as did Rio Tinto plc (ADR) (NYSE: RTP), which shut up $34.05 to $441.00.

Alcoa and Chinalco’s stake could very well obstruct a bid from Anglo-Australian mining giant BHP Billiton for Rio Tinto, the Associated Press reported. BHP Billiton Limited (ADR) (NYSE: BHP) shut up $6.15 to $73.73.
Further, Alcoa and Chinalco said in a regulatory filing that they didn’t intend to make an offer for Rio Tinto, but they reserved the right to announce an offer or participate in an offer within the next six months, the Associated Press reported.

Savvy move

Independent stock analyst C. Leonard Bauer told BloggingStocks Friday the Alcoa/Chinalco play has all the makings of “an additional corporate move to follow, stay tuned.”

“It’s an ingenious move by the two. Chinalco fears a BHP Billiton buy of Rio Tinto will cut its own companies out of access to minerals, minerals that China really needs for its giga-growth economy, and Alcoa gets a stepping stone toward a larger move on Rio,” Bauer stated. “Alcoa already lost out when Rio Tinto bought Alcan. This is Alcoa’s first-shot counter-offensive, and there most likely will be an additional move.” Bauer added that he does not have a rating on Alcoa, Rio, Chinalco or BHP Billiton, and neither does he own the companies’ shares.

The global mining industry is in a period of consolidation and restructuring, driven largely by surging emerging market economic growth and infrastructure development. That global growth requires mine companies huge enough to supply large-demand customers, while maintaining moderate costs, requiring increased economies of scale, which leads to operational expansion and/or mergers/acquisitions.

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Filed under: Deals, Conventions and conferences, Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo! (YHOO)

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) co-founders Jerry Yang, also the company’s chief executive, and David Filo, the less visible of the two, should take Microsoft Corp.’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) $44.6 billion offer before the world’s largest software company realizes how much it is overpaying for the company.

Superior yet, Yang and Filo should “reject” Microsoft’s initial offer because — at least according to CNBC — Microsoft may be willing to up its bid. That seems to be the market’s expectation given that shares of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo haven’t hit the $31 offer level.

The Yahoo twosome need to get while the getting is good. As The Wall Street Journal notes, “If the deal goes through as presently constituted, Mr. Filo’s stake would be worth more than $2.4 billion - not counting his options and other shares..Mr. Yang’s stake would be worth more than $1.64 billion - again, not counting options and so forth.”

During the height of the World wide web bubble, both were worth more than $6 billion, the paper stated.

The forays of Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN into original content already spooks content companies, so I bet if the deal through it will lead to a rash of mergers between old and new media companies. A combined company would likely do more original fare to attract advertisers and users.

This raises the question of whether Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) will start developing its own content given the likely merger and its recent disappointing results. Thoughts?

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Filed under: Deals, Rants and raves, Competitive strategy, Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo! (YHOO), Headline news

The BIG news this morning about Microsofts (NASDAQ: MSFT) offer to buy Yahoo Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) for $44.6 billion has been thoroughly covered all over the media including numerous posts on our site, so I will not pile on or repeat what you can find elsewhere.

Short and sweet: My view is the perfect timing of the offer, not the offer itself, is the news. Microsoft has been rumored to be chasing Yahoo for quite some time and apparently from the substantial offer it made today (60% over yesterdays closing price) money has not been the issue. Obviously Steve Balmer and friends are willing to pay up — way up!

The timing of the offer hits Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) when they’re down - way down! Google has lost a third of its value over the last month and it has lost its momentum going forward. The stock is down substantially today although the company reported solid growth. That’s a significant change in the playing field. Balmer, a very aggressive businessman has decided to make his move now, potentially stealing the momentum on Wall Street.

Two points:

1) MSFT has to do this deal now because there is an outside chance that Google’s market share might go down just enough to make the combined MSFT / YHOO market share equal or more massive to them. If that were to happen the anti-trust machine might swing into action again, so the time is now while the combined company could claim to be the good guys still lagging GOOG by 5% to 6% in market share, improving competition and not thwarting it.

2) MSFT, by making a bold move against Google, now is a real threat because Google has been spending billions to build other revenue streams — so far unsuccessfully. Revenue streams that are substantial and running on all cylinders at MSFT. Think about that GOOG has been adding free software to dilute MSFT unsuccessfully. GOOG can’t make a dent in Vista but MSFT can weaken GOOG search and advertising plenty by adding Yahoo.

Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the design and research principal for an architecture & planning firm. He owns shares of ISRG. To find potential opportunities and verify my track record read Chasing Value or Serious Money. Disclosure: I do not own shares of GOOG or MSFT.

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Filed under: Deals, Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo! (YHOO), Time Warner (TWX)

With Microsoft Corp.’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO), DealBook asks whether Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) will acquire AOL, whose parent is Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX), the parent of BloggingStocks.

Google, whose businesses include an advertising platform as well as an Internet service and a web site, already owns 5% of AOL, and it might feel compelled to bulk up by buying AOL so it can keep up with Microsoft and Yahoo — should they merge.

I’m not sure how much AOL would go for, but my hunch is that Google — whose stock is down almost 10% this day — can find better uses for its capital. How so? If Google bought the remaining 95% of AOL it does not already own, it would get access to the following assets:

• AOL Finance’s leading market share. which, according to comScore, has passed both Yahoo and Microsoft to take the top spot in terms of very special visitors. AOL rose from 12.2 million unique visitors in November to 13.5 million in December, a 10% increase. This is much better than GoogleFinance’s much smaller market share. And according to paidcontent, a full acquisition would aid Google on the advertising side as well as with traction and traffic in portal areas it has yet to conquer such as finance and sports.

• AOL’s very low search market share. According to compete.com, AOL’s search engine market share was a mere 1.7% in December compared to 68.1% for Google. Google wouldn’t be getting much here.
• Considerable cash flows. For the nine months ended September 30, 2007, AOL reported total revenues of $3.930 billion, and had $2.120 billion in operating Income before depreciation and amortization (OIBDA) and $1.739 billion in operating income. Both of these include $668 million related to the sale of AOL’s German access business.

So how much would a 95% stake in AOL cost? Well, applying the ratio of Yahoo’s current price to its cash flow — 23.9 x cash flow — the 95% share of AOL would cost Google $39.6 billion — or 24% of its market capitalization. (To compute this, I annualized AOL’s $2.12 billion worth of OIBDA — a cash flow proxy — and subtracted off the $668 million one-time gain to get $1.74 billion, multiplied it by 23.9 and took 95% of that amount).

This calculation includes subscription revenue, which is declining, so it is arguably on the high side. Still, even if you shave off a few billion from my figure, AOL hardly seems worth the money for Google, despite some of the assets outlined above.

With Time Warner shares up only 1% this afternoon, this idea might be no more than a good headline.

Peter Cohan is President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter. He has no financial interest in the securities mentioned.

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