Bill Gates on Yahoo
Posted on February 21, 2008 By: Mike, VoIP Facts: The Blog email author
Filed Under Articles, Commentary, Industry News
Bill Gates was talking this week, specifically to a group of students at Stanford University in Palo Alta Ca. In an after speech interview with CNET News.com, Gates says what makes Yahoo so valuable to Microsoft is its engineering talent. Never mind market share, its products, or its advertiser base, Microsoft wants the engineers. But do the engineers want Microsoft?
It has been said that the two companies have significant cultural differences, Yahoo being very collaborative with a Linux based open source philosophy. Microsoft has never been accused of being a champion of open source technologies. The engineers that thrive in that kind of innovative environment are even now considering bolting.
Yahoo announced this week a new severance package for their employees, with salary and benefits for two years. In order to stem the potential bleeding, MS will offer a retention package, the details of which have not been made public. Speculation has it that they could offer a $500,000 bonus to the top engineers if they agree to stay for say, three years. Mid level employees could get some stock options, while the bottom tier could be encouraged to leave.
Thing is, software developers are generally not just motivated by money. The risk for Microsoft is that in their quest to take on Google, the very engineers they want to get end up going there, just to stay in an open source environment.
Gates says there is no haggling going on between the two companies over the price, and maintains that the offer is a fair one. Nobody doubts that Microsoft is serious about the acquisition, and will go hostile if need be. Yahoo is taking its time with a formal rejection of the offer, saying it is weighing its options.
Meanwhile, Steve Ballmer, among others on a conference call Thursday, says they will not be suing open source developers for products that connect to Microsoft software. In fact, they intend to publish the APIs, initially for Windows Server and Office 2007, in an effort to bolster interoperability.
Is Microsoft going open source? That might be a smooth move if they want to keep the brains at Yahoo.
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