News today that billionaire investor and Micro-hoo meddler Carl Icahn was given a seat on Yahoo’s board, as well as two additional board seats for people close to him, put to rest fears of a proxy fight at the August 1 Yahoo shareholder meeting. But beyond that, it’s anybody’s guess as to what will happen next: Is […]

Microsoft’s desperate attempts at purchasing all or part of Yahoo in recent months has highlighted the deep and ongoing branding mess that Redmond finds itself in. So bad have things gotten that this fact was acknowledged in no less than MSFT’s internal email on how to get its listing Internet division to profitability: … 4. […]

The Micro-hoo saga has been turning uglier in the last few days, if such a thing is possible: The three-way "negotiations" between Carl Icahn, the Yahoo board, and Microsoft turned up another non-starter offer for MSFT to cherry-pick Yahoo’s search assets, which in turn led to much finger-pointing, and general acrimony. The result is that Icahn may […]

The ups and downs of the Micro-hoo saga continue unabated, with renewed Carl Icahn intrigue being the flavor of the week. The noose that irate shareholders have been verbally tying around Jerry Yang’s neck seems to be getting tighter all the time. But this time even usually stalwart Micro-hoo cheerleader Michael Arrington of TechCrunch is saying […]

OK, this isn’t the post I meant to write, but the (pseudo-)developments are simply happening too fast to catch one’s breath. Today, Microsoft apparently walked away from a Yahoo deal more thoroughly than they previously had, which in itself makes little sense and proves how much Ballmer and Co. have kept themselves in suspended animation during […]

News broke today that Microsoft is phasing out its Craigslist competitor attempt "Windows Live Expo". My goodness WLE, we hardly knew (of) you… It’s no wonder this site failed so completely, Microsoft’s branding is 100% wrong and horrible: Meaningless, confusing, too long/not snappy enough, unmemorable, etc. etc. They don’t get branding at all. I wonder if they’ll […]

There have been surprisingly fast developments in the brewing war over social networking open standards involving Facebook and Google’s FriendConnect and OpenSocial, which I first referenced in last week’s post on Microsoft’s possible rationales for soon making an offer for Facebook. Facebook on Tuesday announced "fbOpen" as its competing OPEN standard for building Facebook compliant social […]