ZDNet.com predicts that if a Yahoo-AOL merger becomes reality, the “integration work is going to be ugly.”
And in more bad news for Yahoo, the Mercury News reveals that “Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang missed his chance to get top dollar for the firm’s stake in Asian Internet firms. The combined market value of holdings in Yahoo Japan, Alibaba.com and Gmarket shrank about $2.1 billion, or 22 percent, to $7.3 billion since Yahoo assessed them in July. The stocks slid on investor concern that Web advertising budgets will shrink amid the credit crisis, a trend that may only worsen. The crunch limits the options left for Yang, who said he may sell or spin off the assets to shore up the stock after failing to reach a buyout agreement with Microsoft. Yahoo kept the stakes even after billionaire Carl Icahn, a Yang critic who advocated their sale, joined the board in August, and Yahoo shares fell Tuesday to the lowest in five years.”
Internetnews.com has an interesting article on “the anatomy of Facebook’s facelift,” which points out that it can be difficult for social networks to go to a full advertising-supported business model because many users view their profiles as “private spaces” and therefore feel a bit betrayed by the insertion of ads (as witnessed by the protests to Facebook’s new design, which puts advertising front and center).
The New York Times today has a good comparison of Android and the iPhone.
According to the Register, “David Axmark, co-founder of MySQL, has quit Sun Microsystems because he ‘hates’ all the rules he has to follow at the company. ‘I have thought about my role at Sun and decided that I am better off in smaller organisations,’ wrote Axmark in his resignation letter, according to a blog post from Sun flack Kaj Arnö. ‘I HATE all the rules that I need to follow, and I also HATE breaking them. It would be far better for me to <retire> from employment and work with MySQL and Sun on a less formal basis.’ Sun acquired MySQL in January when it bought the open source database developer for $1bn.”