Pablo Brenner & Sergio Fogel Blog

Wisdom of the crowds? Que tan inteligente es un grupo de personas? Un modo de averiguarlo va a ser la partida de ajedrez organizada por CrowdChess entre un grand master (Gawayn Jones) y miles de personas. Veamos quien gana, aunque si el publico pierde queda la excusa de como se organizo la votacion de los movimientos.

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Adaptado del preambulo a las instrucciones para dar cuerda a un reloj de Julio Cortazar. Espero que Julio me perdone por el plagio. Sin duda el lo hubiera hecho infinitamente mejor, pero lamentablemente no vivio para conocer una notebook.

Piensa en esto: cuando te regalan una notebook te regalan un pequeño infierno florido, una cadena de rosas, un calabozo de aire. No te dan solamente la notebook, que los cumplas muy felices y esperamos que te funcione bien porque es de buena marca, Dual Core, 2 giga de RAM, pantalla de 14 batería de 6 horas que esperamos te dure; no te regalan solamente ese yugo que colgarás de tu hombro y pasearás contigo. Te regalan -no lo saben, lo terrible es que no lo saben-, te regalan un nuevo pedazo frágil y precario de ti mismo, algo que es tuyo pero no es tu cuerpo, que marcará tu hombro, arruinará tu vista y forzará a tus dedos a adaptarse a un teclado diseñado para un niño.

Te regalan el deber de transferir todos tus datos y el pánico de olvidarte de algo muy importante. Te regalan el miedo de perderla en un avión, de olvidártela en el auto y que te la roben, de que se te caiga al suelo y se le rompa la pantalla, de que tu hijo la use y le deje marcas de dulce de leche en el teclado, dedos en la pantalla y un troyano en el disco. Te regalan su marca, la promesa de que es un modelo mejor que las otras, y la certeza de que ya existe un modelo mas bonito, mas potente y mas barato. Te regalan un eterno sentimiento de culpa por no hacer backup ni tener el antivirus al día, y el pánico de que te roben los datos y pierdas tu identidad para siempre.

Te regalan la tendencia de comparar tu notebook con las de tus amigos, sabiendo que, mas tarde o mas temprano, ella quedara obsoleta y tú relegado a ser el infeliz propietario de un pedazo del pasado, invendible a un precio que valore tus sentimientos hacia ese pedazo de hardware, un reflejo de tu propio envejecimiento. No te regalan una notebook, tú eres el regalado, a ti te ofrecen para el cumpleaños de la notebook.

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Si se cae el deal Microsoft-yahoo (como parece), microsoft va a tener que salir de shopping.

Se supone que nada en el mismo orden de magnitud, pero se comenta que va a gastar unos 10 Billones en 10-20 adquisiciones, la gran pregunta para el foro: Quienes son los candidatos?

Teoricamente, si conseguimos identificar alguno de estos, y (asumiendo que es public) si uno invierte ahora, deberia tener un buen upside llegado el momento.

Algunas ideas? Se habla de AOL, y de MySpace, entre otras…..

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David Belz, amigo uruguayo-israeli, que fue Director of Engineering en Cisco Israel hasta hace un par de meses, me paso este video. Impresionante!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcfNC_x0VvE&feature=related

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Hablando con gente que volvio en estos dias de China (mucha gente fue este mes por la feria de Guangzhou), es interesante prestar atencion a los cambios que esta poniendo china a la politica impositiva.

Por lo visto, se sacaron los beneficios a todas las industrias que el Gobierno Chino definio como no estrategicas, y entre las no-estrategicas estan todas las industrias que consumen mucha agua, mucha electricidad, las que generan polucion, etc.

Es interesante, ver que china esta tomando estas medidas, y obviamente las esta tomando «a lo China», es decir, decreto de un dia para el otro, y al que no le guste mala suerte.

Como va a influir eso en la economia? Me imagino que muchas empresas buscaran mudarse a otros lugares en la region, me imagino que indonesia, malasia, vietnam, camboya y a otras regiones de China (algunas provincias son mas relaxed). Pasara parte de esa produccion a nuestra region?

Por ejemplo la industria textil usa mucha agua, por lo que en china va a ser castigada, crecera centroamerica entonces?

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Gentileza de Thomas:

CEO Jerry Yang.

May 3, 2008

Mr. Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089

Dear Jerry:

After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.

I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!’s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal.

I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter, and I especially appreciate the time that you have invested personally.

I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible.

I am disappointed that Yahoo! has not moved towards accepting our offer. I first called you with our offer on January 31 because I believed that

a combination of our two companies would have created real value for our respective shareholders and would have provided consumers, publishers,

and advertisers with greater innovation and choice in the marketplace.
Our
decision to offer a 62 percent premium at that time reflected the strength of these convictions.

In our conversations this week, we conveyed our willingness to raise our offer to $33.00 per share, reflecting again our belief in this collective opportunity. This increase would have added approximately another $5 billion of value to your shareholders, compared to the current value of our initial offer. It also would have reflected a premium of over 70 percent compared to the price at which your stock closed on January 31. Yet it has proven insufficient, as your final position insisted on Microsoft paying yet another $5 billion or more, or at least another
$4 per share above our $33.00 offer.

Also, after giving this week’s conversations further thought, it is clear to me that it is not sensible for Microsoft to take our offer directly to your shareholders. This approach would necessarily involve a protracted proxy contest and eventually an exchange offer. Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo! undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft.

We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo!
undesirable to us for a number
of reasons:

— First, it would fundamentally undermine Yahoo!’s own strategy and long-term viability by encouraging advertisers to use Google as opposed to your Panama paid search system. This would also fragment your search advertising and display advertising strategies and the ecosystem surrounding them. This would undermine the reliance on your display advertising business to fuel future growth.

— Given this, it would impair Yahoo’s ability to retain the talented engineers working on advertising systems that are important to our interest in a combination of our companies.

— In addition, it would raise a host of regulatory and legal problems that no acquirer, including Microsoft, would want to inherit. Among other things, this would consolidate market share with the already-dominant paid search provider in a manner that would reduce competition and choice in the marketplace.

— This would also effectively enable Google to set the prices for key search terms on both their and your search platforms and, in the process, raise prices charged to advertisers on Yahoo. In addition to whatever resulting legal problems, this seems unwise from a business perspective unless in fact one simply wishes to use this as a vehicle to exit the paid search business in favor of Google.

— It could foreclose any chance of a combination with any other search provider that is not already relying on Google’s search services.

Accordingly, your apparent plan to pursue such an arrangement in the event of a proxy contest or exchange offer leads me to the firm decision not to pursue such a path. Instead, I hereby formally withdraw Microsoft’s proposal to acquire Yahoo!.

We will move forward and will continue to innovate and grow our business at Microsoft with the talented team we have in place and potentially through strategic transactions with other business partners.

I still believe even today that our offer remains the only alternative put forward that provides your stockholders full and fair value for their shares. By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table.

But clearly a deal is not to be.

Thank you again for the time we have spent together discussing this.

Sincerely yours,

Steven A. Ballmer
Chief Executive Officer
Microsoft Corporation

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