Brier Dudley's Blog

Brier Dudley offers a critical look at technology and business issues affecting the Northwest.

April 24, 2008 1:45 PM

Buyout guru: Ballmer has to buy Yahoo, no need to raise bid

More from the WTIA Investment Forum today:

During his lunchtime keynote, Francisco Partners founder Benjamin Ball was asked whether Steve Ballmer should be going after Yahoo.

Running a buyout firm specializing in turnaround tech deals -- his firm snapped up Seattle's Watchguard, Attachmate and WRQ -- Ball has a little perspective here.

"I think he has to buy Yahoo,'' Ball said.

"I like mergers of this type of nature because we've crated a lot of a value that way," he explained. "I don’t think he has to pay anything more because I think Jerry Yang and the guys at Yahoo are in a lot more trouble than they think."

But Ball said he didn't know whether the Yahoo deal will be enough for Microsoft to knock the Google guys off their perch. "Those guys, they're not going to fall off, so to speak,'' he said.

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Posted by Fred Flintstone

3:42 AM, Apr 27, 2008

It's obvious that Microsoft has a love/hate relationship with the Web. They try to coexist, but at the same time the Web itself is the biggest threat to Microsoft. Remember what Microsoft was like *before* Netscape?

Maybe they ought to try something different - the Web has huge security problems and is simply a terrible platform for anything other than newspapers and Amazon.com...

Rather than downplaying all of the risks of the Internet, maybe Microsoft should be the ones who point out the fact that their proprietary systems really work, are secure, and have a great user interface. As opposed to the jury-rigged WWW which has a terrible record at security, not "architected" as much as built higgledy-piggledy by people looking to cash in and not at all interested in whether it was structurally sound.

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