For a long time now, it has been Microsoft constantly raiding the Yahoo talent pool, as one top tech exec after another has left its Sunnyvale, Calif., HQ to join the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant.
Well, turnabout is fair play for Yahoo, as it nabs a top Microsoft ad exec.
The former head of Google Health, Adam Bosworth, officially unveiled his much anticipated health-care start-up today at the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco, showing off a site that will offer step-by-step and personalized “care plans,” as well as many kinds of online tools to better understand the data and tips on how to stay healthy.
It’s perfect timing, given the health-care debate now raging in Washington, which is about how people make health-care decisions–or, more precisely, how they usually do not.
Here’s a video interview with Bosworth.
Way back in the fall of 2001, BoomTown attended a keynote speech at the now-defunct Comdex show in Las Vegas, where Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates continued to bang the drum for one of his long-running obsessions: The tablet computer.
It is an obsession he has never given up.
So it is ironic that all the hype has suddenly and firmly coalesced around the particulars of the tablet that Apple has developed–a device being spearheaded by CEO Steve Jobs and likely to arrive in the coming months.
Last week, a cougar was reported to be roaming on the Redmond, Wash., campus of Microsoft.
Here’s an image the very fine global alert from Microsoft Global Security first sent last week, which assured employees of the software giant that “Microsoft Security will conduct frequent patrols of all wooded areas of the campus.”
That’s more than you can say about how the software giant handles hackers!
If you want to get Hollywood movie studio types irked, mention Google. And if you want them steamed, bringing up Netflix will usually work.
But if you want to see the tops of their heads blow off, Redbox is just the ticket.
Except not to their movies, it seems, if the major movie studio execs have their way in an ever-growing legal battle with the DVD-rental kiosk company.
A typical consumer named Louie Swisher, though, begs to differ.
BoomTown just got this interesting memo that Yahoo CMO Elisa Steele sent out to her staff immediately in the wake of the deal for Microsoft to take over Yahoo’s search technology business two weeks ago.
I render it unto you, dear readers, since it shows just how intent the top managers of Yahoo are, especially internally, in reassuring those concerned that Yahoo had not just gutted itself and how it would remain as innovative as ever.
Also amusing–for reasons I cannot understand since it is an internal memo–is the use of the code name for Yahoo, which is called Yale, after the famous university in New Haven, Conn.
After all the investor hubbub over the oh-no-they-didn’t deal between Yahoo and Microsoft starts to die down a bit, the pair are now embarking on the path that is the only way toward proving the efficacy of them joining together.
That would be getting a variety of state, federal and international regulators to say yes to the wide-ranging online advertising and search arrangement they announced last week so they can start making it work.
According to sources at both companies, a variety of filings will be made this week, including one to the Securities and Exchange Commission that should provide more details of the partnership.
While at Microsoft HQ last week, right after the online advertising and search deal with Yahoo was struck, BoomTown interviewed a passel of Microsoft execs, including Online Audience Business SVP Yusuf Mehdi, who has been a key player in the many–and mostly disastrous–attempts that the software giant has made to form some sort of alliance with Yahoo over the years.
While Wall Street threw raspberries at the Silicon Valley icon for the deal, Microsoft got kudos for grabbing a large piece of share that it could use in its ongoing battle with archrival Google.
In this video interview with me, Mehdi defended it as a “win-win”–what else is he going to say?–for both Yahoo and Microsoft.
BoomTown is spending the day at Microsoft HQ in Redmond, Wash., interviewing a passel of execs about the Yahoo online advertising and search partnership.
But, while here, I have not been able to resist trotting out this very funny puppet video by 1938 Media of sweat-stained Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gone wild, screaming about how he smoked the Yahoo partnership, to every Softie I see.
Because I am that sensitive.
Isn’t it ironic that Yahoo once employed–and for a very long time–top search techie Qi Lu and here he was on stage at the Financial Analyst Meeting at Microsoft HQ in Redmond, Wash., after having just scooped up that business for the software giant.
Lu, who is now president of the Online Services division at Microsoft, was not generous with the details, although he did say making the partnership work was his No. 2 priority after Microsoft’s own search business.
While Microsoft COO Kevin Turner did a kind of modified cheerleading act at Microsoft’s annual Financial Analyst Meeting, Entertainment and Devices President Robbie Bach played the teenage boy and Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie the voice from the future.
It included Bach playing ball with Microsoft’s new motion-sensing, controllerless Project Natal and Mundie introducing a very creepy digital assistant with more than a passing resemblance to HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
First up at Microsoft’s Financial Analyst Meeting today, as you might imagine, is CEO Steve Ballmer, who is as bouncy and braggy as I have ever seen him, probably because he is fresh from getting his mitts on a long-sought-after prize–the search business of Yahoo.
But, while Wall Street thinks Microsoft made out well in the deal, the opinion about Yahoo’s side of the deal has been not so positive, with its shares down another five percent today already, after plummeting 12 percent yesterday.
Thus, Ballmer to the rescue!
“This is the one that stuns me, that people haven’t figured it out,” said Ballmer. “It’s sort of, like, unbelievable.”
The fun never stops at Microsoft, it seems.
Well, not fun–more like a long march of khaki-clad Softies.
They will be on display bright and early this morning at the company’s annual Financial Analyst Meeting, a cavalcade of top execs at the tech giant blabbing away.
Big topics? I am interested in the recent billion-dollar revenue miss in earnings and, of course, more details about the Yahoo search deal.
BoomTown will be there covering it in person, natch!
Multiple sources close to the situation said that the online search and advertising deal between Microsoft and Yahoo has been struck and will be announced within the next 24 hours.
While it is not clear if the actual papers have been inked or approved by the boards of the two companies, sources said it was a formality and that negotiations are complete on a deal that is less sweeping than originally conceived.
In any case, making any partnership is likely to be the cause of much relief at both companies, since they have been trying–without success–to join together to mount a better offense in the search sector against the dominant Google.
How low can Microsoft go?
Very low, it seems, in announcing really bad fourth-quarter earnings, missing Wall Street revenue estimates by an astonishing $1 billion.
Talk about a game of extreme limbo.
No surprise–Microsoft shares have been taking a beating in after-hours trading.
BoomTown liveblogged the earnings call.
Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
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