We heard that Microsoft invested $240 million dollars into Facebook. But for the US Elelctions, Facebook wanted to to allow its users to find a polling place as well as mark if they had voted and who they supported.
Despite Microsoft having Virtual Earth for it’s Maps – who does Facebook use instead – Google!
Feeling the love, Microsoft?
Is this yet another product like Google Talk that Google will carry on supporting even though it’s market share is peanuts?
Chrome to take over IE – bunch of bollocks! Chrome has lost market share week on week – and the above graph shows it’s heading down south.
Web Browser is something that people get attached to – it’s not easy to convert someone, especially this late in the market when you have IE, Firefox, Opera and others fighting for market share.
Personally I use IE and Opera, but prefer IE. Sure IE is a bit buggy and it has had its flaws, but I don’t think we would have heard of that many in the press, if it wasn’t for the fact that majority of the world use it.
Graph from Marketshare
Yahoo hasn’t done overly well when it released its figures to the public. Their net profit for Q3 2008 was US$54 million down from US$151 million for the same period in 2007.
Overall revenue figure of SU$1.78 billion is only 1% increase from Q3 last year.
Yahoo has struggled compared to the like of Google, MySpace and Facebook. Seems like the worldwide crises have hit Yahoo! pretty hard as people close their wallets on advertising budgets.
The company announced that they expect “to reduce its global workforce by at least 10% during Q4 of 2008″. This will reduce their costs by approx $400 million. When asked during a phone interview when Yahoo! intends to do so, Jerry Yang, CEO of Yahoo!, said “We want to do it before the holidays”.
Yahoo is yet to get an approval from the US Justice Department in regards to their deal with Google and if it can go ahead. A decision is expected soon.
However, should the deal go through Yahoo would make millions (as I am sure Google would too). Over the last 3 months Yahoo!’s shares have dropped over 40%, but rose 7% (in after trading hours) when the layoffs were announced.
Maybe Microsoft can pull them out from this mess – this time at say $15 a share? Come on Steve Ballmer, make that phone call!