Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Twitter in Microsoft/Google Three-Way, as Search Giant Crashes Data-Mining Party
How nonexclusive is Microsoft’s deal with Twitter? So nonexclusive that just hours after Microsoft announced it, rival Google lurched forward to say that it has entered into a similar partnership with the microblogging service.
The search giant may be second to this party, but it’s not going to be late.
But make no mistake–this is very clearly a rush job. Microsoft has code running. Google does not.
Here’s official confirmation of the search partnership Microsoft has struck with Twitter, first reported by BoomTown earlier this morning. It’s being distributed as Qi Lu, president of Microsoft’s Online Services Division, presents at the annual Web 2.0 Summit.
Netflix is headed to the iPhone–at some yet-to-be-determined point in the future. Asked by Reuters if he’d ever consider a partnership with Apple, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said he would, but only after the company had secured its foothold on videogame consoles and elsewhere.
“This is the one that stuns me, that people haven’t figured it out,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer this morning in Redmond at the company’s annual Financial Analyst Meeting, truly surprised at Yahoo investors’ negative reception to the Microsoft-Yahoo deal. How to convince them otherwise? Not to fear, Steve! The Microsoft-Yahoo propaganda machine is in full swing and has already produced its first talking-points docs.
When Google took a five percent stake in AOL for $1 billion in 2005, it valued the company at about $20 billion. Last year the search giant wrote down $726 million of that investment. And now, according to a regulatory filing, Google has gone and sold its share back to Time Warner for $283 million, about a quarter of what it originally paid for it. 
The long-standing legal dispute between Toys R Us and Amazon has been resolved in the toy retailer’s favor, but at a much discounted price. In a regulatory filing submitted to the SEC Friday, Amazon said it has agreed to pay Toys R Us $51 million to settle claims that it violated a former exclusivity agreement with the company.
What’s in a name? Apparently, the answer to Microsoft’s many search problems. As we previously reported, the software behemoth plans to debut its new search service at our D: All Things Digital conference later this week, and when it does it may have a new name. Reports claim that Microsoft Live Search, once known as Windows Live Search, and prior to that as MSN Search, will henceforth be known as… Bing.
“Google abandoned [its deal with Yahoo] not because pressing ahead with it ‘risked’ a protracted legal battle, but because it guaranteed one.” I wrote that on Nov. 6, following the official dissolution of Google’s proposed advertising partnership with Yahoo. Turns out the guarantee to which I referred was an ironclad one. Sanford Litvack, the attorney who would have been lead counsel in the event of a government antitrust case against Google, tells American Lawyer Daily that the Department of Justice was literally hours away from suing the company when it bailed on the deal.
Now that Yahoo is trading at $12.63 in an economy that’s falling Homer Simpson-style down the long rocky slope of economic collapse, some of the company’s institutional investors are hoping to convince it to sell itself to Microsoft again.
