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MICROSOFT-YAHOO TIMELINE

January 2008: Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo for $44.6bn in cash and shares, later raised to $47.5bn
May 2008: Microsoft walks away from the table after the two sides fail to agree on a price
June 2008: Yahoo strikes a deal to use Google’s technology, with Google ads appearing on some Yahoo search results
November 2008: Google abandons the Yahoo deal after objections from anti-trust regulators in the US
November 2008: Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang stands down as the firm’s boss
April 2009: Yahoo says it will cut 5% of its workforce after quarterly profits drop sharply
May 2009: Microsoft relaunches its own search engine, now branded bing.com
July 2009: After new speculation, Microsoft and Yahoo finally announce a web search deal

The deal ends years of back-and-forth negotiations between the two companies.

Microsoft originally offered to buy Yahoo in January 2008 - with an offer worth about $47.5bn.

But Mr Ballmer later withdrew that bid after Yahoo’s then boss, Mr Yang, demanded a higher price.

Yahoo instead opting for an online advertising partnership with rival Google instead.

But that tie-up was later abandoned because of the risk of a protracted battle with regulators over competition issues.

Tuesday, 22 April 2008

Microsoft has released their  Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) yesterday at with the announcement in microsoft forum.

They are also in the final stages of preparing for release to the web on April 29th, via Windows Update and the Microsoft Download Center. Online documentation for Windows XP SP3, such as Microsoft Knowledge Base articles and the Microsoft TechNet Windows XP TechCenter, will be updated then. For customers who use Windows XP at home, Windows XP SP3 Automatic Update distribution for users at home will begin in early summer. From Chris Keroack, Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) Release Manager

New and exciting features

Here are some end-user features you can expect to see in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1.

Activities

Activities are contextual services to quickly access a service from any webpage. Users typically copy and paste from one webpage to another. Internet Explorer 8 Activities make this common pattern easier to do.

Activities typically involve two types of scenarios: “look up” information within a webpage or “send” web content to a web application. For example, a user is interested in a restaurant and wants to see the location of it. This is the form of a “look up” Activity where the user selects the address and views an in-place view of the map using his favorite map service.

WebSlices

WebSlices is a new feature for websites to connect to their users by subscribing to content directly within a webpage. WebSlices behave just like feeds where clients can subscribe to get updates and notify the user of changes.

Favorites Bar

In Internet Explorer 7, the Links bar provided users with one-click access to their favorite sites. The Links bar has undergone a complete makeover for Internet Explorer 8. It has been renamed the Favorites bar to enable users to associate this bar as a place to put and easily access all their favorite web content such as links, feeds, WebSlices and even Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.

Automatic Crash Recovery

Automatic Crash Recovery (ACR) is a feature of Windows®Internet Explorer® 8 that can help to prevent the loss of work and productivity in the unlikely event of the browser crashing or hanging. The ACR feature takes advantage of the Loosely-Coupled Internet Explorer feature to provide new crash recovery capabilities, such as tab recovery, which will minimize interruptions to users’ browsing sessions.

Improved Phishing Filter

Internet Explorer 7 introduced the Phishing Filter, a feature which helps warn users when they visit a Phishing site. Phishing sites spoof a trusted legitimate site, with the goal of stealing the user’s personal or financial information. For Internet Explorer 8, we are building on the success of the Phishing Filter with a more comprehensive feature called the “Safety Filter.”

Here: Link

Early today, Microsoft announced its bid to acquire Yahoo! for $44.6 billion. The offer amounts to $31 per share, a 62 percent increase over Yahoo’s stock price of $19.18 on Thursday. The proposed deal, as widely reported, signals Microsoft’s intensified aggression against Google, which dominates Internet search with 60 percent of the market, as well as online advertising. The bid, if accepted, would be Microsoft’s priciest acquisition to date.

Can Microsoft and Yahoo’s combined force, which would represent about 30 percent of the Internet search market, effectively rival Google? The answer remains to be seen, of course — besides whether or not Yahoo will accept Microsoft’s bid, there’s the legal question of whether the acquisition would violate antitrust regulations. Most reports, however, suggest the inevitability of this effort. The New York Times outlines Microsoft and Yahoo’s failed discussions of a merger in May, leading to Microsoft’s current “hostile” bid and the possibility of mounting a proxy contest for control of Yahoo’s board.

One immediate effect has already been seen in the stock exchange. Today’s afternoon trading showed an increase of nearly 50 percent in the value of Yahoo’s shares, at about $28.50. On the other hand, the value of Microsoft’s shares declined by 6 percent. Google’s shares showed a similar change, with a 7 percent decline in value.

This short-term effect mirrors long-term possibilities, as contemplated by Tim Weber of BBC News. While Yahoo, which has watched its stock fall and just today appointed a new chairman, Roy Bostock, stands to benefit immensely from Microsoft’s generous resources, this move could represent either Microsoft’s greatest coup or its final hurrah, according to Weber.

“Microsoft knows that its stronghold, the PC business, is getting less and less important,” he writes. “The future of today’s IT industry is the rapidly growing mobile internet space, and Google has made no secret that it is prepared to spend a lot of money to conquer this market.”

The BBC News analysis ends with a flashback to the oft-maligned AOL-Time Warner merger. At The Wall Street Journal’s DealJournal, Dennis Berman explores this angle in depth, echoing a common critique of Microsoft — that it favors acquisition over innovation. In order to succeed against Google, Microsoft and Yahoo will have to prove this assertion false.

Fast Company