IT News - E-vizio.com

Vanjezi · #1 (**permalink**) 22nd-August-2007, 06:17

Google Aims to Make YouTube Profitable With Ads

Ever since Google bought YouTube last November, it has avoided cluttering the site and the video clips themselves with ads, for fear of alienating its audience.

The strategy helped cement YouTube’s position as the largest video Web site but didn’t do much to justify YouTube’s $1.65 billion price tag.

Now Google believes it finally has found the formula to cash in on YouTube’s potential as a magnet for online video advertising and keep its audience loyal at the same time.

The company said late Tuesday that after months of testing various video advertising models, it was ready to introduce a new type of video ad, which it said was unobtrusive and kept users in control of what they saw.

The ads, which appear 15 seconds after a user begins watching a video clip, take the form of an overlay on the bottom fifth of the screen, not unlike the tickers that display headlines during television news programs.

A user can ignore the overlay, which will disappear after about 10 seconds, or close it. But if the user clicks on it, the video they were watching will stop and a video ad will begin playing. Once the ad is over, or if a user clicks on a box to close it, the original video will resume playing from the point where it was stopped.

“What we have come up with is a user-controlled ad format that is engaging,” said Eileen Naughton, Google’s director for media platforms. “We want our users to be able to accept and choose what type of advertising they engage in.”

For now, Google will place the ads only on video clips of its content partners — the more than 1,000 small and large media companies that have licensed their videos to YouTube. By doing so, YouTube will avoid the potential liability of having ads appear on copyrighted clips it is not authorized to display. And it will also prevent ads from playing on clips generated by users whose message may not be to the liking of advertisers.

The revenue from the ads will be split between the media partner and YouTube. Ms. Naughton said Google would charge advertisers $20 for every 1,000 times the ads were displayed. Google said the ads would begin appearing today throughout the site. Ms. Naughton also said advertisers would be able to take aim at specific channels and genres, as well as demographic profiles, geography and hour of the day.

If successful, the video ads could persuade more media companies to license their content to YouTube as a way to make money from it, analysts said.

“Today, YouTube is a sunk cost for Google,” said Darren Aftahi, a securities analyst with ThinkEquity Partners. “If they can couple the proper advertising with the proper content, there is a tremendous opportunity for the company.”

With 51 million users in June, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, YouTube now attracts an audience that is larger than the combined audiences of its three nearest competitors, MySpace, AOL and Yahoo. Its adoption of overlay ads for online video could turn the format into an industry standard, advertising executives said. The video ad market, which is expected to nearly double from last year to $775 million, has been projected to grow to $4.3 billion by 2011, according to eMarketer, a research firm.

But while Google may help popularize the format, it did not invent it. Smaller online video companies, like VideoEgg, a video advertising start-up in San Francisco, have been using similar overlay ads for nearly a year.

Troy Young, VideoEgg’s chief marketing officer, said the goal was to get away from forcing users to watch an ad before showing the clip they wanted to see. Those ads are known as “preroll” and are the most common form of online video advertising so far.

“On the Internet, you have a lot of short-form content, and preroll wasn’t going to work for short content,” Mr. Young said. Mr. Young said that preroll, and “midroll” ads that appear in the middle of a clip, may be appropriate for television shows, movies or other long videos. But overlays have proven effective at making money with short clips, he said. Viewers click on them at a rate roughly five times higher than banner ads, he added.

In tests, YouTube users had clicked on overlays five to 10 times more frequently than on banner ads that already appear on some YouTube pages, Ms. Naughton said. Yahoo has also been testing overlay video ads, creating further momentum for the format.

“We need to be in a place where we have standard overlays and standard measures of engagement across all portals, before the entire preroll industry can shift in any big way,” said Rebecca Paoletti, director of video strategy at Yahoo.

Source http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/22/te...rssnyt&emc=rss

andreapito · #2 (**permalink**) 22nd-August-2007, 20:15

Vanjezi · #3 (**permalink**) 17th-October-2007, 03:16

MySpace and Skype to Announce Partnership

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 16 — In a deal that will connect two of the largest Internet services, MySpace, the social network owned by the News Corporation, will announce on Wednesday that it is teaming up with Skype, the Internet telephone service owned by eBay.

In November, MySpace will add the Skype features and brand to its instant messenger software, which allows MySpace users to conduct text chats with each other. MySpace users who download the newest version of that software will also be able to make free calls from their computers to each other, and to anyone else on the Skype network.

“We are interconnecting the world’s largest voice network and the world’s largest video and social network,” said Michael van Swaaij, interim chief executive officer of Skype. “It feels like an obvious fit.”

The companies hope that the combination will accelerate the growth of two already robust online networks. MySpace has 110 million active users around the world, but its members are mostly concentrated in the United States. Skype has 220 million users, most of them outside of this country. There is little overlap, particularly in the United States, where, according to Nielsen NetRatings, only 6.7 percent of Skype users are also users of MySpace’s instant messenger software.

The two companies say they will split the revenues when MySpace members use Skype’s pay features, like voice mail boxes and calling to and from Skype accounts and regular landlines and mobile phones. They have not disclosed the exact ratio of that split.

“If we can engage the user base in the right way and increase usage and create the right sort of premium experience that people want to participate in, as well as monetize around the free environment through advertising, it can be a viable business partnership,” said Amit Kapur, vice president of business development at MySpace.

The deal could be beneficial to both companies. MySpace’s instant messenger software, used by about 25 million people, trails rival services from AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft in popularity and features. Those services already let people make voice calls in addition to conducting text chats. With the Skype deal, MySpace catches up.

The partnership gives Skype increased exposure at a difficult time. EBay recently acknowledged that it overpaid by more than a billion dollars in its $3.1 billion acquisition of Skype in 2005, and Skype’s co-founder, Niklas Zennstrom, recently left the company.

Both Skype and MySpace say they will deeply integrate the other into their services. On every MySpace page, members will have a chance to click on a link and make a Skype call to another member. Skype will direct users to register for a MySpace page on several of its own sign-up pages. The two companies will also combine the member directories of Skype and MySpace instant messenger.

Skype also allows face-to-face video chats, but MySpace is not rolling out that service yet, despite the obvious fit for a social network with an emphasis on dating.

“Video calling is widely used and people love it,” said Mr. van Swaaij of Skype. “But we want to focus on getting the basics done first. That is step one and we’ll take it from there.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/te...ss&oref=slogin

#4 (**permalink**) 19th-October-2007, 09:08

E-Vizio.com is introducing a whole new site design merging with joomla cms system

Vanjezi · #5 (**permalink**) 14th-November-2007, 19:46

xexe never

Inbox 2.0: Yahoo and Google to Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network

Ignore Orkut, OpenSocial, Yahoo Mash and Yahoo 360. Google and Yahoo have come up with new and very similar plans to respond to the challenge from MySpace and Facebook: They hope to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) into social networks.

Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people. That’s why the social networks offer to import the e-mail address books of new users to jump-start their list of friends. Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts.

I don’t have a lot of detail from Google, but I’ve heard from several executives that this is their plan. When I talked recently with Joe Kraus, who runs Google’s OpenSocial project, he said: “We believe there are opportunities with iGoogle to make it more social.” And when I pressed him about the relationship between the social aspects of iGoogle and Gmail versus Orkut or some other social network, he said, “It is much easier to extend an existing habit than to create a brand.”

Brad Garlinghouse, who runs the communication and community products for Yahoo, was a lot more forthcoming. He didn’t-have dates or specific product details either. But he did say that Yahoo was working on what he called “Inbox 2.0.”

This has several features. First, the e-mail service is made more personal because it displays messages more prominently from people who are more important to you. Yahoo is testing a method that can automatically determine the strength of your relationship to someone by how often you exchange e-mail and instant messages with him or her.

“The inbox you have today is based on what people send you, not what you want to see,” Mr. Garlinghouse said. “We can say, here are the messages from the people you care about most.

Yahoo Mail will also be extended to display other information about your friends as well. This can be a link to a profile page, and also what Yahoo calls “vitality” –- updated information much like the news feed on Facebook. There could also be simple features that are common on social networks, like displaying a list of friends whose birthdays are coming up.

“The exciting part is that a lot of this information already exists on our network, but it’s dormant,” Mr. Garlinghouse said.

What Yahoo is missing in this vision is a personal profile, where users express their interests and personality to others. Yahoo, of course, has had many different takes on this over the years: its member directory, Geocities, Yahoo 360. It recently started Yahoo Mash. But none of these is quite right, Mr. Garlinghouse said. Mash is simply an experiment, not a product being readied for mass promotion.

There will be some sort of profile system attached to Inbox 2.0, he said. For people who use a lot of Yahoo services, this profile could be quite rich even at the beginning, as it can draw on activity on Yahoo Music, Yahoo Shopping and so on.

“If I get an e-mail from Saul Hansell, I should be able to click on his name and see his profile,” Mr. Garlinghouse said. “The profile page is where you can expose what you want people to know about you.

In this vision, people have two pages: a profile they show to others and a personal page on which they see information from their friends as well as anything else they want, like weather or headlines. That’s different from MySpace, which combines all this into one page.

Already My Yahoo and iGoogle are increasingly collections of widgets that hold content and applications from multiple sources, some of them already social, like e-mail and feeds from social sites like Flickr. But much more is coming.

This approach has a lot of potential and a few pitfalls. To start with, everyone who joins Facebook understands that what they do on the site is about sharing information with friends and sometimes strangers. People who use Yahoo Mail, or just exchange messages with someone using a Yahoo Mail account, have no such expectations. So the company will have to be very careful in how it explains what it is doing and ask for permission in the right places.

“This isn’t a separate product,” Mr. Garlinghouse said. “This is an integration that has to be seamless to the user.”

What’s more, running social networks is like starting nightclubs. You need music and beer, of course, and some hard-to describe magic that draws people to the club. Yahoo and Google are so big that the most they could aspire to would be to create the online equivalent of a crowded bar at a train station, rather than a club for a particular sort of person.

But since Yahoo and Google already have hundreds of millions of people visiting each month, it may well be that they can get a fair number to stop and chat.

Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/1...rssnyt&emc=rss

Vanjezi · #6 (**permalink**) 21st-November-2007, 02:26

Firefox Browser Adds Security, Search With 3.0 Beta Release

A beta version of Mozilla's Firefox 3.0 is out today, moving its next-generation browser one step closer to general release.

Mozilla has released a beta version of Firefox 3.0, moving its next-generation browser one step closer to general release.

Close to 75,000 developers have been testing early "alpha" versions of Firefox 3.0 code for several months now, but this first beta release of the code, unveiled today, should open up the software to a much larger group of testers, said Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of engineering.

"The move from alpha to beta typically means that we've hit a point of quality where we believe the browser is useable as a daily browser," he said. "For us, it's a step up in terms of getting closer toward the final release."

Schroepfer expects a second beta to follow by year's end followed by a final beta 3 update in early 2008. By the time the finished product is unveiled, sometime in 2008, the team hopes to have close to half a million users testing its software.

One of the big changes with Firefox 3.0 is an overhaul of the way the browser bookmarks and keeps track of browsing history. With this new feature, called Places, browsing history will now be stored in a database, meaning that it will be much easier for Firefox users to search for sites they've visited. "Because of the new Places infrastructure we're able to store a much larger component of your history," Schroepfer said.

And the browser will now be able to search what is being typed into the address bar to see if it's relevant to previous Web visits. For example, someone who had recently visited a Web page entitled "Review of 2008 Toyota Prius," could type "Prius" into the address bar and would be directed to the review page.

Security has also taken a front seat with Firefox 3.0

The browser is now integrated with Google's database of known malicious Web sites and will warn users before they visit sites that are considered to be dangerous.

And Firefox's download manager is now better integrated with antivirus software, making it easier to spot malicious files before they are placed on the desktop. The browser will no longer allow add-ons to be downloaded from insecure sites, mending a practice that could have serious security ramifications according to some.

Much of the hardest work has been under the hood, however. Firefox sports a new HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) rendering engine, called Gecko 1.9, that will make it perform better in the graphically rich Web 2.0 world, where developers are trying to find new ways of running software whether the PC is connected to the Internet or not. "You won't see those as a user right away," Schroepfer said. "But you'll see Web applications do more interesting things and run more quickly in Firefox over time."

Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,13...a/article.html

Vanjezi · #7 (**permalink**) 5th-December-2007, 14:51

A Year Later: Chat on AIM through GMail

Google’s $1 billion investment in AOL may not have been the most financially savvy move as an investment. (Most analysts think AOL is worth far less than the $20 billion value that Google put on it.) But Google did get some payoff today.

Now Gmail users can have instant-message conversations with users of AOL’s AIM system. (Here is Google’s blog post on this.) Google’s standalone message system, Google Talk, has not been a big hit. Then it started integrating its instant message system in a column on the left margin of Gmail, and it is picking up some more users.

Still, in the United States, AIM continues to be the dominant instant-message system by far. A typical teenager is chatting away on AIM, even as he or she trolls MySpace or Facebook for dates.

AIM, in theory, may be AOL’s single most valuable asset. But in well over a decade, the company hasn’t really been able to take advantage of it. The perfectly sensible idea of turning AIM into a social network — AIM Pages — was a wipeout.

AOL does make money with one of my least favorite user experiences on the Web. It opens the AIM Today portal every time you log onto AIM. You can disable this pop-up by finding a checkbox hidden in the service’s preferences. But every time you update the AIM software, it overrides this preference and restores the pop-ups. Grrr. (End of rant.)

Now it’s Google’s turn to see if it can turn the vast community of AIM users into anything more valuable. The company is working on its own plans to create social networking features built on Gmail and its iGoogle personal home page. Maybe these will be accelerated by the reach of AIM. But it is not clear how this would work.

By the way, AOL’s message software can’t send messages to Google users. An AOL spokeswoman said that its developers have other priorities and it hasn’t decided if it will add this in the future.

At a time when the word “open” is taken as holy word in the technology community, instant-message systems remain divided into two camps. Microsoft’s MSN Messenger, which dominates many countries in Europe, and Yahoo Messenger, which is also quite large, are connected. And there are some small services, like Meebo, which lets users log into all of these services simultaneously. This too may be softening. Microsoft has a test version of its message system that can link to GTalk. And Yahoo is testing a new service called MyM, which also lets users link to various messaging services.

All this is still a mess that doesn’t work the way any user would want: Let me talk to anyone else any way I want.

I suspect that all this openness will benefit Google. It has the best brand image at the moment and has the easiest time getting users to try its products. So eliminating the entrenched advantages of other sites — like their closed message systems — should increase usage of its products.

Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/1...rssnyt&emc=rss

Vanjezi · #8 (**permalink**) 16th-January-2008, 16:53

Tiny New Laptop: MacBook Air

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple on Tuesday introduced a movie rental service and an ultralight Mac notebook that could set a new industry standard for thinness.

The new Apple notebook, the MacBook Air, is about three-quarters of an inch thick at its thickest point, small enough to fit in a manila envelope, which is how Steven P. Jobs, chief executive, demonstrated it to a crowd of Apple fans at the Macworld Expo. He said the price is $1,799.

“This is the world’s thinnest notebook,” said Mr. Jobs. The new notebook features a 13.3-inch screen and a five-hour battery.

Perhaps its most interesting feature, however, is the one that is missing. The new notebook does not come equipped with an optical drive for playing CDs and DVDs, though one is available as an option for $99. Instead, Apple has equipped it with remote software that lets users play DVDs and CDs on another computer as if they were on the notebook.

On the environmental front, where Apple has received criticism, the MacBook Air uses a mercury-free display. Its circuit boards are bromide-free and PVC-free, Mr. Jobs said, and the system uses less packaging than in the past.

The new iTunes Movie Rental service, available immediately as a free software update, is offering movies newly released on DVD for download at $3.99 and movies from the rental library for $2.99. Customers have 30 days to view a movie after they have rented it, but only 24 hours to view it completely once they started it. A movie can be moved between devices, such as Macs, TVs and iPod.

The new service pits Apple against the likes of NetFlix, Comcast and other independent distributors that are just beginning to dabble in online movie rentals.

The Apple service includes titles from all the major studios, Mr. Jobs said, including Touchstone, Miramax, MGM, Lion’s Gate and New Line Cinema, Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Walt Disney and Sony Pictures.

Mr. Jobs also announced a new version of Apple TV that does not require a cable for users to play movies from iTunes directly on the television.

On Apple’s iPhone, Mr. Jobs said sales now totaled four million after six months in the market. Apple’s initial goal for the device was to sell 10 million by the end of this year.

The company also released an update to the iPhone that includes several new features, like the ability to send text messages to multiple people at the same time and the addition of maps that show the user’s location.

“All of this in two weeks, and we’ve got 50 more weeks to go,” Mr. Jobs said.

Investors appeared to have been looking for more. Apple’s shares were down more than 6 percent late in the trading session, to $167, with most of the decline coming after Mr. Jobs’s keynote address began.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/te...rssnyt&emc=rss

MacBook Air only 1.94 cm

Vanjezi · #9 (**permalink**) 2nd-February-2008, 18:03

Microsoft Bids $44.6 Billion for Yahoo

SAN FRANCISCO — In a bold move to counter Google’s online pre-eminence, Microsoft said Friday that it had made an unsolicited offer to buy Yahoo for about $44.6 billion in a mix of cash and stock.

If consummated, the deal would redraw the competitive landscape in Internet consumer services, where both Microsoft and Yahoo have both struggled to compete with Google.

The offer of $31 a share represents a 62 percent premium over Yahoo’s closing stock price of $19.18 on Thursday. It would be Microsoft’s largest acquisition ever.

Microsoft said the combination of the two companies would create efficiencies that would save approximately $1 billion annually. The software giant also said that it had an integration plan to include employees of both companies and intends to offer incentives to retain Yahoo employees.

Steven A. Ballmer, the Microsoft chief executive, said that he called his Yahoo counterpart, Jerry Yang, on Thursday night to tell him that Microsoft intended to bid on the company, and that they had a substantive discussion. “I wouldn’t call it a courtesy call,” he said in an interview.

Mr. Ballmer said he had decided to pursue a takeover because friendly deal negotiations would most likely be protracted and would probably become public.

“These things are hard to keep quiet in the best of times,” he said. He said his conversation with Mr. Yang was constructive, but suggested that a deal may not come easily.

Yahoo said in a news release Friday that its board would evaluate Microsoft’s bid “carefully and promptly in the context of Yahoo’s strategic plans.”

In a letter to Yahoo’s board, Mr. Ballmer wrote that the two companies discussed a possible merger, as well as other ways to work together, in late 2006 and 2007. Mr. Ballmer said that in February 2007, Yahoo decided to end the merger discussions because its board was confident in the company’s “potential upside.”

“A year has gone by, and the competitive situation has not improved,” Mr. Ballmer wrote.

As a result, he said, “while a commercial partnership may have made sense at one time, Microsoft believes that the only alternative now is the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo that we are proposing.”

Mr. Ballmer met several times in late 2006 and 2007 with Terry S. Semel, then Yahoo’s chief executive, people involved in the talks said. While the talks — originally focused on the prospect of a merger or a joint venture — were initially constructive and appeared to move forward, they quickly broke down, these people said.

After a series of secret meetings between both sides in hotels around California and elsewhere, Mr. Semel and Yahoo’s board decided against progressing with the talks, betting that its stock would turn around as it introduced a new advertising system called Panama, these people said. Mr. Yang, in particular, was adamantly against selling the company to Microsoft and championed the view of remaining independent, they added.

Mr. Ballmer constantly consulted with Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, about the progress of the negotiations, people close to the company said, and when the talks collapsed, he decided to wait to see the fate of Yahoo’s stock price. As the stock continued to fall, they said, Microsoft’s management became emboldened and began internal meeting in late 2007 about the prospect of making a hostile bid.

Despite their heavy investments in online services, both Yahoo and Microsoft have watched Google extend its dominance over Internet search and the lucrative online advertising business that goes along with it.

“No one can compete with Google on their own any more,” said Jon Miller, the former chairman and chief executive of AOL. “There has to be consolidation among the major players. It has been a long time coming, and now it is here.”

In recent months, Yahoo has struggled to develop a plan to turn around the company under Mr. Yang, its co-founder, who was appointed chief executive amid growing shareholder dissatisfaction last June.

Yahoo investors, however, remain skeptical. The company’s shares have slumped, and the closing price on Thursday was 44 percent below its 52-week high.

Yahoo’s shares closed Friday up 48 percent, to $28.38. Microsoft’s shares were down nearly 7 percent, and Google’s shares declined nearly 9 percent.

Microsoft, like Yahoo, has faced an uphill battle against Google. The company invested heavily to build its own search engine and advertising technology. Last year, it spent $6 billion to acquire the online advertising specialist aQuantive. Microsoft’s online services unit has been growing, but remains unprofitable.

Meanwhile, Google’s share of the search market and of the overall online advertising business has continued to grow.

Announcing its quarterly earnings earlier this week, Yahoo said it would cut 1,000 jobs in an effort to refocus the company and reduce spending, and issued an outlook for 2008 that disappointed investors.

The timing of Microsoft’s bid could allow the company to mount a proxy contest for control of Yahoo’s board should it try to dismiss the offer. Microsoft has discussed the prospect of mounting such a campaign, people close to the company said, and has until March 13 to propose a slate.

In his letter to Yahoo’s board, Mr. Ballmer wrote, “Depending on the nature of your response, Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo’s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal.”

On Thursday night, Yahoo announced that Mr. Semel, its nonexecutive chairman and former chief executive, was leaving the board. Under Mr. Semel, a long-time Hollywood studio executive who ran Yahoo from 2001 to 2007, the company became more focused on its advertising and media businesses, but was unable to keep up with Google’s challenge in Web search and advertising and with the rise of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook.

A longtime board member, Roy J. Bostock, has been named nonexecutive chairman, Yahoo said.

Microsoft said it believes the Yahoo transaction could receive the necessary regulatory approvals in time to close by the second half of this year.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/01/te...tml?8au&emc=au

Vanjezi · #10 (**permalink**) 11th-February-2008, 18:43

Yahoo Officially Rejects Offer

Yahoo officially rejected Microsoft’s $44.6 billion takeover offer on Monday, calling the bid too low.

“After careful evaluation, the board believes that Microsoft’s proposal substantially undervalues Yahoo including our global brand, large worldwide audience, significant recent investments in advertising platforms and future growth prospects, free cash flow and earnings potential, as well as our substantial unconsolidated investments,” the company said in a statement.

The company said it would continue to evaluate all its options.

Yahoo shares rose in morning trading Monday, apparently on anticipation that Microsoft might sweeten its offer. They were trading at $29.44, up 24 cents. Microsoft’s shares were at $28.08, down 48 cents.

Analysts have suggested the company could afford to pay as much as $35 a share for Yahoo, up from its current offer of $31.

The next move is now up to Microsoft and a largely unknown executive on the company’s sprawling campus, Christopher P. Liddell.

Mr. Liddell, a former banker from New Zealand, is the behind-the-scenes architect of Microsoft’s hostile takeover, the company’s first unsolicited bid and perhaps the most audacious effort by a technology company to wrestle control of a competitor.

With Yahoo’s board rejecting Microsoft’s advances, it will fall to Mr. Liddell, an outsider to the software industry who joined Microsoft as its chief financial officer just two years ago, to plot the company’s next steps in this bitter battle — and in the process, reshape Microsoft’s not-invented-here culture toward making aggressive acquisitions.

“You have to be disciplined and ruthless,” Mr. Liddell said by telephone last week, before Yahoo’s board decided to rebuff the offer. “We should see acquisitions as a way of growth. We should not be embarrassed at all.”

Microsoft has made acquisitions over the years, but mainly smaller ones to jump-start a fledgling business or pick up a needed technology. Its media player, voice recognition, health search and business software, among others, are technologies Microsoft bought along with the companies that created them.

However, when it has come to making big deals, it has balked until recently. In late 2003, Microsoft talked to the big German business software maker, SAP, about buying it. The deal, had it been pursued, would have cost Microsoft more than $50 billion.

The talks, made public in a court case in 2004, were abandoned, Microsoft said, because of the “complexity of the potential transaction,” especially the management headaches of trying to put the two big software companies together.

Mr. Liddell, who calls himself Microsoft’s “gatekeeper of funding,” spent the weekend devising ways to raise the stakes in the fight for Yahoo now that the company’s original proposal has been rejected, holding a series of marathon conference calls with his cadre of Wall Street advisers.

More an accountant than a technologist, Mr. Liddell, who joined Microsoft after serving as chief financial officer at International Paper, the giant forest products company, clearly has no compunction about ruffling any digital feathers. Among his alternatives is a series of bare-knuckle Wall Street tactics: First, Microsoft is planning to crisscross the nation to meet with Yahoo’s largest shareholders in an election-style campaign, hoping they can put pressure on Yahoo’s board, people briefed on the company’s plans said.

Microsoft may have an easier time than it could have had two weeks ago: since then, millions of Yahoo’s shares have traded hands to short-term-oriented hedge funds that typically favor a quick sale, as opposed to value investors who hold shares for the long term.

Microsoft could also decide to make an offer directly to shareholders, called a tender offer, which would put more pressure on Yahoo’s board to negotiate. At the same time, Microsoft could also set a deadline for its bid, known as an “exploding offer.”

And if Microsoft decides to make this a nasty battle, it could start a proxy contest to oust Yahoo’s board at its next election; it would have until March 13 to nominate a new slate of directors.

Microsoft’s advisers in the takeover effort are Morgan Stanley and the Blackstone Group. Its lawyers are Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft.

They are facing Yahoo’s team of bankers at Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Moelis & Company, and its lawyers at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

Microsoft also hired outside public relations advisers, Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher and Waggener Edstrom Worldwide. Yahoo has Abernathy-McGregor and Robinson, Lehrer, Montgomery.

Microsoft may simply raise its offer to clinch a deal. But Mr. Liddell, speaking generally about negotiations, seemed to suggest he was willing to play hardball. “You have to be willing to walk away,” said Mr. Liddell, who plays rugby regularly and has completed several triathlons.

For Mr. Liddell, who sends e-mail messages to colleagues at all hours and is a PowerPoint whiz, the prospect of joining Microsoft as an outsider and trying to transform it into a financially oriented acquisition machine was daunting. “I knew there had been a history of people coming in here and it not working,” he said.

Mr. Liddell was one of several high-profile outside hires at Microsoft in recent years including Ray Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes, as the company’s chief software architect; and B. Kevin Turner, a former Wal-Mart executive, as chief operating officer.

Mr. Liddell, who has a master’s degree in philosophy from Oxford, found that with Bill Gates and the president, Steven A. Ballmer, “If you do a good job, you fit in. They don’t suffer people very well who don’t come prepared.”

He has a background as an investment banker at Credit Suisse First Boston in Auckland. Since he joined the company, Microsoft has made 50 acquisitions.

He has pushed the company to use its cash — it has spent $54 billion on stock buybacks and dividends since his arrival. And it has even taken on, dare it be said aloud at Microsoft, debt for the first time in the company’s history. If the company’s bid for Yahoo is successful, Microsoft will be doing both.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/te...rssnyt&emc=rss