Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Ballmer on Yahoo Search Deal: “Blah, Blah, Blah”

ballmerWhat popped Yahoo’s stock more than six percent yesterday? If you believe the market soothsayers, it was Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s desire to get a deal done, expressed at the company’s annual analysts presentation.

Really? Because I listened to the event live, and if there was anything new from Ballmer, I missed it. But don’t take my word for it. Here are Ballmer’s comments, via a transcript provided by Microsoft (MSFT):

You all know that I would like to figure out how to pool somehow Microsoft and Yahoo. I’m not talking about doing an acquisition, blah, blah, blah, back to search deals, blah, blah, blah, I don’t know if anything is going to happen.”

There you go, Yahoo (YHOO) investors–go nuts.

Anyone who doesn’t care about the back-and-forth/will-they-won’t-they between Sunnyvale and Redmond may still find Ballmer’s presentation worthwhile. I was particularly interested in his comments about Microsoft’s continued interest in the TV/entertainment business.

I’ve embedded the slides from the event below; the first part of the presentation was from CFO Chris Liddell. You can listen to audio from the event here.


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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik