After the broken deal with Microsoft we haven’t seen anything new happening over at the Yahoo! office (although they launched Shine while the deal was on its peak). Now Yahoo! looks all set to launch a new homepage which will surely be soothing for your eyes. The new homepage isn’t highly cluttered and here you have the chance to suggest them some new feature which you think will make your life a cakewalk!

Check the screenshot (the red arrow) and you will see the Gmail Logo there. In the sidebar you can add features as per your ease and even the non-Yahoo! services.

The home page is still under testing phase and many new features will be incorporated in the time to come. One thing is for sure, people love changes and new homepage will surely be appreciated if it helps the users.

This is getting serious now. Around two months back Microsoft made a proposal to acquire Yahoo! at a 62% premium to its closing price on January 31, 2008. Yahoo! didn’t respond and everything just ended up being part of articles over various blogs big and small (I didn’t write about it.) Since then Yahoo! has been trying to work out with many other new ventures may be with a thought to get some jump in the Microsoft bid but they never said anything officially about the acquisition.

Now it looks like Microsoft has waited a lot for Yahoo! to respond and finally they have given Yahoo a three week time period after which they say they will directly approach their shareholders instead of the Yahoo Board of Directors.

This is what the letter has to say:

Dear Members of the Board:

It has now been more than two months since we made our proposal to acquire Yahoo! at a 62% premium to its closing price on January 31, 2008, the day prior to our announcement. Our goal in making such a generous offer was to create the basis for a speedy and ultimately friendly transaction. Despite this, the pace of the last two months has been anything but speedy.

While there has been some limited interaction between management of our two companies, there has been no meaningful negotiation to conclude an agreement. We understand that you have been meeting to consider and assess your alternatives, including alternative transactions with others in the industry, but we’ve seen no indication that you have authorized Yahoo! management to negotiate with Microsoft. This is despite the fact that our proposal is the only alternative put forward that offers your shareholders full and fair value for their shares, gives every shareholder a vote on the future of the company, and enhances choice for content creators, advertisers, and consumers.

During these two months of inactivity, the Internet has continued to march on, while the public equity markets and overall economic conditions have weakened considerably, both in general and for other Internet-focused companies in particular. At the same time, public indicators suggest that Yahoo!’s search and page view shares have declined. Finally, you have adopted new plans at the company that have made any change of control more costly.

By any fair measure, the large premium we offered in January is even more significant today. We believe that the majority of your shareholders share this assessment, even after reviewing your public disclosures relating to your future prospects.

Given these developments, we believe now is the time for our respective companies to authorize teams to sit down and negotiate a definitive agreement on a combination of our companies that will deliver superior value to our respective shareholders, creating a more efficient and competitive company that will provide greater value and service to our customers. If we have not concluded an agreement within the next three weeks, we will be compelled to take our case directly to your shareholders, including the initiation of a proxy contest to elect an alternative slate of directors for the Yahoo! board. The substantial premium reflected in our initial proposal anticipated a friendly transaction with you. If we are forced to take an offer directly to your shareholders, that action will have an undesirable impact on the value of your company from our perspective which will be reflected in the terms of our proposal.

It is unfortunate that by choosing not to enter into substantive negotiations with us, you have failed to give due consideration to a transaction that has tremendous benefits for Yahoo!’s shareholders and employees. We think it is critically important not to let this window of opportunity pass.

Sincerely,
Steven A. Ballmer
Chief Executive Office
Microsoft Corp.

What say? Are you ready to see the face to face WWE between Microsoft and Yahoo!?

This time I will keep you updated with the happenings..

After Bill Gates showed interest in buying Yahoo the Sunnyvale, California-based company has been trying its best to retain hold of the reader base which it has earned in years. Looks like they are not ready to give up their business and Yahoo Shine is another attempt to cash on the 40 million females visitors which yahoo has in its bag.

Basically shine is a blog with a magazine style theme which focuses very well on the various categories like parenting, sex and love, healthy living, food, career and money, entertainment, fashion, beauty, home life, and astrology.

The homepage also give you the option to create your own blog (once you are logged in) and you can even leave comments for various posts. This commenting feature will attract many bloggers like me so that they can publicize their tiny blogs.

I am sure this project will add some bucks to the bid which Microsoft will offer for Yahoo!

A year back Bill Gates announced that Microsoft will be supporting the OpenID concept and that was enough to launch OpenID in the ever expanding web 2.0.  At that time OpenID was accepted by some 500 services including LiveJournal, social networking site Vox and photo-sharing site Zooomr. But that wasn’t enough for the OpenID concept to actually takeover the Internet.

To be frank OpenID has been suffering from huge marketing problems. People have accounts over a couple of websites which support the OpenID concept but I am very sure that they have no idea what is OpenID and what are it’s benefits. People still prefer using their respective login accounts for different services instead of using OpenID for all of them.

But with the recent announcement by Yahoo that it’s 926 applications will be supporting OpenID and Google enabling the OpenID support for the blogger users, the OpenID concept is set to rise. I hope the two giants will be able to bring the concept of OpenID to the masses and some day I will be able to use one single ID for my yahoo, gmail, orkut, wordpress, blogger ….. accounts!

Google Suggests suggest you an example of what you were searching, displaying along with the example the number of results for that keyword. Yahoo, a little late though, has also launched it suggestions tool Yahoo Search Suggest. Similar in working like Google Suggestions Yahoo forgets to tell you the number of results for that keyword.

Google Suggests FAQ states that it has integrated the technology with Google News too. Its a different case that I wasn’t able to find that working. Yahoo on the other hand is still working with there new tools bug fixes.

Google and Yahoo both let you disable the suggest feature if you find it disturbing. I do not find it disturbing though. Its more of a helper many times. Like if I was to search for Arnold Swarchenegger both would display the full spelling when I type Arnold S. It saves me from writing down that sir name. Quite a help!