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Yahoo has pulled out of the bidding to buy a stake in America Online (AOL), according to reports in the Wall Street Journal and the Reuters News Agency.
they were in the bidding just to make sure the price went way up
Good business I say.... if anything Yahoo and Microsoft must already have a whole heap of users compared to Google - would they not have advertisers and publishers.... sorry and a few gmail accounts...
I reckon it's a straight slug and I won't be betting against Microsoft... even if they overpaid by $2bill - I am sure they could recoup that very quickly through advertising and traffic - plus of course satisfaction at a. beating google and b. increasing their search share %
Not sure Google is going to want to almost clear out the bank for AOL ... although who know?
All conjecture of course... but good fun to second guess all the same.
they would pay $2 Billion just for a "Google Loses" story ;).
(Anyone else read James Fallow's piece in the New York Times last Sunday on Yahoo? A better than average wrapup.)
My guess: they were in the bidding just to make sure the price went way up
No one does this in the "real world." If they didn't want the business, they would not have bid. What would they have done if they won? (If they really didn't want the business.)
No one does this in the "real world."
Simply not true.
Regardless, certainly AOL has value to Y! at some cost, and they simply have to make sure that the competitor pays AT LEAST that much.
10% market share is nothing to sneeze at.
[achoooASK.comsoldfor$1.85bnoooo]
Simply not true.
Simply true. You're telling me the obvious, but that's not what the post said.
bidding just to make sure the price went way up
No one bids just to make sure the price went way up. That's NOT real world. They might bid based on value, but not to screw the other guy, that's just plain nonsense.
Sure, you could argue that you are bidding so you don't miss out on $2 traffic (or AOL for a song), but certainly you are only bidding $9.99 to make sure your competitor is paying as much as you can make him.
This is an every day strategy for lots of real world people here, but I admit the use of the word "only" is a bit extreme.
Whats the estimated price for AOL? 10B+?
That's what I was figuring.... so if MSFT stay in the game and push that price higher... then if Google has to spend $5b to get their slice (because AOL and TW are saying they do not want to be bought out but to Partner with someone) then that's a huge amount of money gone for good!
BG could dip in his pocket and pull that sort of cash out without even registering a blip on what else the copany wants to spend money on R&D wise - google simply can't!
Well, you did confuse Yahoo! for where AOL should have been.
Well, I guess I see it as bidding $9.99 on overture when your competitor is bidding $10.00 just to make him pay more.
It's highly unlikely they are using the Overture bidding method to secure AOL's business. We're talking about a multi-billion dollar, multi-year deal here. Not a ten dollar bid to see who is at the top of the a list of advertisers in the next five minutes.
