According to GoDaddy’s Bob Parsons, Yahoo! not only blew a recent takeover offer from Microsoft, but they’ve also lost many talented employees as a result of the disappointment of that Microsoft deal gone sour and subsequent decisions. As if that’s not enough, Yahoo! is also raising their rates for domains.
“… to the dismay of many of their shareholders they fumbled Microsoft’s forty seven and a half billion dollar takeover offer …many of [Yahoo!'s] talented employees leaving them in droves. But the management at Yahoo!, well they didn’t want to stop there. It wasn’t enough to blow one hell of a deal and to drive away their most talented employees, they decided that this was an excellent time to stick it to their domain name customers …that Yahoo! just decided unbelievably that all customer’s domain names will renew at the outrageous rate of $34.95 a year. Now keep in mind that most of these domains were registered at Yahoo! at rates as low as GoDaddy’s rates …so [GoDaddy] put together a special rescue offer …you can transfer it to GoDaddy for just $6.99 and also get a year of domain registration to boot.”
-Bob Parsons of GoDaddy
See Bob’s full video blog from June 30, 2008 for more information and details
Yahoo! Sinks Deal with Microsoft - Loses Talented Employees
So why do big companies like Yahoo! pull stunts like this? I can’t comment on their handling of the Microsoft takeover offer because I don’t know anything about it. I can only speculate that the employees Bob Parsons says left because of Yahoo!’s mismanagement of the deal and later poor decisions have left Yahoo! because they saw how bad Yahoo! could be. Imagine the realization, “Oh no, Yahoo! is not good, they’re evil. I’d better get another job.” Now certainly Yahoo! isn’t evil, but you get the point.
On July 10 “Yahoo! Recruits Dev Army With Open Search Move” by Renay San Migeul of LinuxInsider, mentioned a couple of things I found interesting and enlightening:
- Yahoo!’s stock prices are dropping rapidly - “…stock price is in free fall…“
- Yahoo! has invited 3rd party developers to use their search technology to build their own search engines
- according to an analyst at Forrester Research “…this is the beginning of the future of search…”
- Yahoo! will share revenues with (from?) these 3rd party-developed search engines
In light of the first 2 facts above I was thinking Yahoo! was in major trouble and failure of the latest Microsoft bid to buy them out was simply more than some employees could take, so they began worrying about their careers and moved on. Some desiring a guaranteed future or not liking the internal changes that may surround the news above may have moved on for those reasons — but others may have seen an opportunity. Why work for Yahoo! when you can work with them? Some might have seen recent goings on as the perfect time to go start their own businesses or join companies whose Internet presence could leverage these new developments to increase profits. And exactly what would happen to such a new employee that brought his or her knowledge of Yahoo! into a new company, possibly catapulting their revenue stream higher? Hmmm, that’s a no-brainer!
Yahoo! Increases Domain Prices
But what about the increase in domain name prices? That could be tied to Yahoo!’s concern about their stock prices or simple greed. Why follow a discount domain name pricing structure like GoDaddy or DirectNIC when you can charge prices like Network Solutions or Register.com or Domain Registry of America (yes, that was a sarcastic put-down)? They will certainly have fewer customers, might put some smaller companies that react too slowly out of business, but in the end will they be making the same amount of money off of fewer customers? I hope not. I think we already have enough Register.com and Domain Registry of America’s in the world as it is.
July 29th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
found your site on del.icio.us today and really liked it.. i bookmarked it and will be back to check it out some more later ..