The Bailey Mail Business World Feed

Microsoft's Failed Yahoo Bid May Kill Their Search Aspirations

After their failed Yahoo bid, Microsoft is left pondering its next step. It is widely thought that Yahoo was Microsoft's only chance of competing with Google, now making mincemeat of Microsoft, both in market share of searches and online (Pay-per-click) advertising.

There is now talk of Yahoo partnering with Google which I think would be harmful for us as searchers, though perhaps only marginally more harmful than a Microsoft Yahoo takeover. The latter is still possible, analysts point to Oracle's failed bid for their rival BEA, which was upped into a successful bid some months later.

If Microsoft fails to obtain Yahoo, I don't think they have any hope of even becoming stiff competition to Google. If Yahoo partners with Google, Microsoft may just pack its bags and go back to making operating systems.

I'll be honest with you, I don't know why but I just don't like Windows products. I am a firm user of Windows and I probably always will be, but it is because of the bad press Windows has received, that I use it more through habit and fear of change, and it is the same bad press that prevents me from using any of their online endeavours, including Live Search, Hotmail, and Messenger � I just don't use Microsoft online.

Having said that, when everyone started using Google for searches, I had already fallen in love with Ask Jeeves, after seeing adverts for the SE on TV, it took me ages to convert to the search giant Google, but I am now a fully paid member of the Google fan-club.

If I'm honest I would rather see Microsoft takeover Yahoo, because to be honest I still think Google would win the battle of the search engines. As my job involves writing content for search engine optimisation, focussing on Google, I feel a Google-Yahoo merger may force me to go back to the drawing board, whereas a Microsoft-Yahoo takeover may affect me very little. But like everyone else, I guess I'll just have to wait and see.

India Pledges Massive Investment in Africa

India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has pledged to invest $500 million in Africa, in a bid to re-established strong trade and cooperation ties, with India's desperation to find new sources of natural resources. The move is also in response to China recently muscling in on countries previously mainlining good relations with India.

Speaking at the first summit aimed at strengthening India/Africa ties Singh also said he would give greater access to exports from the world's poorest countries, many of which are in Africa.

Addressing the 14 African leaders at the summit, including, Uganda's Yoweri Museveni, Ethiopia's Meles Zenawi and South Africa's Thabo Mbeki, Singh said:

"No one understands better than India and Africa the imperative need for global institutions to reflect current realities and to build a more equitable global economy and polity."

Mbeki also made conciliatory statements about how the two countries had many challenges in common: "Our enemy is common. We both have poverty and underdevelopment."

The BBC's India correspondent said that India will offer increased aid and low-cost solutions to poverty, in return for greater access to Africa's natural resources. Though India Africa trade is now at $30 billion per year, it is only a fraction of China's.

India has a long history of assisting African countries, and this summit is about getting something back. A couple of years ago China held a similar summit, and though China's Africa trade is far larger, most analysts believe India has the edge, because of its expertise in the field of low cost technology, and it being a major supplier of generic pharmaceuticals.

It is nice to write about a country that is doing well financially helping to do something about the dire poverty that exists in Africa, even if it is with ulterior motives. There is far too much poverty, hunger, war, and violence in the world, schemes like this are a refreshing break from the norm.

Wall Street Journal Comes to London

In a move a James Bond meglo-foe would be proud of, Rupert Murdoch is to start publishing the Wall Street Journal in London, in what can only be seen as a direct attempt to further damage other publications, like Pearson's Financial Times. I for one neither have any doubt nor am afraid to say that Rupert Murdoch's ultimate goal in life is to control the world of Main Stream media.

It goes on sale from April 16 from 250 newsagents in the heart of London's financial district, in Canary Wharf "The City" The West End, Heathrow Airport and other UK airports

The Wall Street Journal will cost £2.50, which is a pound more than the Financial Times, but a realistic price based on other non-UK publications being sold in the UK. Rupert Murdoch having anything to do with the WSJ has been enough for me to stop reading it, and Financial Times now have my readership.

British Airways Open BA-Only Terminal 5 at Heathrow

British Airways is moving into its controversial Terminal 5 overnight 26/27 Mar 2008. The new terminal was controversial because of its size, and protests by eco-groups. Now that it is built and in operation, it will remove some of the congestion that Heathrow airport is best known for, running some 27 million passengers per year over its 40 million per year capacity. The new terminal's capacity is 30 million passengers per year which doesn't give them much expansion room, but there you go.

The new terminal is for British Airways only, and BA hope that the new terminal will be handling 90pct of its passengers by October next year. Willie Walsh, BA's chief executive said in a statement that the transfer operation, ahead of tomorrow's opening, would be a historic move:

"Everyone knows the exceptional congestion that Heathrow endures as the world's busiest international airport. But we are relocating to a completely new terminal without requiring any kind of shutdown by the airport authorities."

The first flight from Hong Kong is scheduled to land at 4:50am 27 Mar, and the first departure will leave at 6:20 that evening.

Shock Rise in UK Retail Sales for February

UK Economic analysts have been shocked by an upturn in retail sales for the Month of February, fuelled mostly by increases in food purchases from Supermarkets. Retail sales figures for February climbed 0.5% from figures taken in January this year, and 5.5% from the figure of February last year. The upturn is in stark contrast to what analysts expected, having predicted a 0.2% fall in retail sales for February.

It is likely that the rise will cause the Bank of England to withhold the planned interest rates cuts, possibly as far back as May, because the rise in sales shows consumer spending hasn't yet started to fall because of fears over the credit crunch, and turbulence in the global economy.

The Bank recently reiterated its continued commitment to reduce economic pressure by keeping close control over inflation, which according to, even the government friendly Consumer Prices Index is currently running above the 2% target at 2.5%.

Marks and Spencer Buy Controlling Share in Eastern European Franchise

UK retail chain Marks and Spencers has announced that it is buying a majority 51% stake in COMS, one of its Eastern European franchise holders since 1996, for $13.6 million EURO, with the possibility that they will pay up to a further 5.2 million EURO if performance targets are met. COMS run 13 M&S stores, and the deal will see them open another 30 stores between the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania over the next few years.

A Marks & Spencer spokesman said: "There is a great opportunity to open many more Marks & Spencer stores across Central and Eastern Europe and grow a real presence in the region. The Marks & Spencer brand is already well-recognised in the Czech Republic and there is increasing demand for good quality, great value products in markets like Slovakia."

M&S wants its international operations to account for 15-20% of their total revenue by 2011.

AOL Buy BEBO in Multi-Million Dollar Cash Acquisition

AOL is paying $580 million dollars in cash to buy the second most popular social bookmarking site BEBO. The deal will bring AOL's advertising reach to 80 million viewers. BEBO had been level-pegging with MySpace for many months but has just started to pull ahead. Comscore put BEBO at 10.6 unique page-views, while MySpace had only 10.2, and BEBO users stayed on the site an average 38 minutes, MySpace users stayed on only 27.

There is no denying that MySpace and Facebook are the two most popular social networking sites in America, but in Britain BEBO reigns supreme. BEBO's uniquely winning feature is its online TV show Kate Modern. The show is named after the main character, a straggly art student, whose name: Kate Modern is a play on the London art gallery the Tate Modern.

BEBO has been in the news a lot lately, firstly signing a deal with Yahoo, to display their ads in return for Yahoo linking BEBO to its answers search facility, and adding BEBO functionality to the Yahoo toolbar. Then signing a deal with Microsoft so BEBO users can IM anyone friend or not using MSN messenger. It is unclear what will happen to these collaborative services when AOL takes BEBO on, because both companies are AOL rivals.

It is also unclear just how much good BEBO will do AOL's profits, as advertising hasn't proven very successful on social networking platforms. In a March 9 interview at SXSW, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his company was close to breaking even -- in other words the company isn't yet making a profit despite its being valued at $15billion. Google has also been disappointed that its deal to display ads on MySpace hasn't been generating the returns they imagined.

With this knowledge, companies are now hoping widgets and applications will prove a successful way of monetising the social networking platform. "We used to look at social network sites like we would any ad-supported sites, like the NYTimes," said Tim Armstrong Google's president of advertising at a Bear Sterns media conference on March 10. "Now we think differently. We look at social networks as a platform and see an opportunity to monetize widgets and social network applications."

BEBO has recently added widgets to its program, and AOL will benefit from its platform A demographic targeting capabilities, which may make advertising with BEBO's audience more successful than other social networking advertising endeavours. When all is said and done only time will tell how successful BEBO's acquisition will be for AOL, but they have a history of failing to properly integrate their acquisitions, like advertising firms Advertising.com and Tacoda, both bought by AOL in billion dollar deals, and both not achieving their full potential for AOL.

Morrisons Chief Bows Out on a High

Sir Ken Morrison, the man who turned Wm Morrison's into one of Britain's biggest supermarket chains, from its small beginnings as a Bradford market stall is retiring. He will mark the end of his 56 year career with a 1bn pound buy-back of company shares.

The buy-back plan will be officially unveiled on Thursday when the company reports a 70% increase in its pre-tax profits on the figure this time last year; results allowing Ken Morrison to go out with a bang when he steps down officially the day after the meeting.

Many analysts have commented on Morrison's being too lightly geared, reckoning the company could cope with an extra 1bn net debt on its balance sheet, especially since it owns 98% of its stores freehold. The buy-back plan is a mixture of capitalizing on a slight fall in share prices from a year long rain of above 300p, to 295p, and also battening down the hatches in case of a rough stock-market ride as global markets slow.

OPEC: US Mis-Management Responsible For Oil Price Hike

As new records are set for the price of crude oil per barrel, and despite heavy U.S. pressure, OPEC, the organization responsible for providing 40% of the world's oil said today that they would not increase their output. OPEC President Chakib Khelil hit back at the Bush administration blaming the rising price of oil on U.S. mismanagement leading to the falling value of the dollar.

His actual words were:

"If the prices are high, definitely they are not due to a lack of crude. They are due to what's happening in the U.S., there is sufficient supply. There's plenty of oil there."

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries consists of Iran, Iraq, Qatar, Nigeria, Libya, Kuwait, Angola, Algeria, Ecuador, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Venezuela and Indonesia, Iran is the only OPEC country to which the OPEC production quotas do not apply.

Facebook Fall Maybe Beginning of the End

Massive social networking community Facebook suffered its first downturn in new visitors after almost seventeen months of growth. The downturn has been blamed by some, on the likes of politicians and big corporations creating Facebook profiles. Ironic that something politicians and executives do to increase their street cred with today's youth, should actually have the opposite effect and make the medium they choose to reach out with less credible.

Nielsen online, the company who compiled the data said one month's decline was not enough to suggest a downturn in social networking across the board, or even a severe drop in Facebook's popularity, adding that it could just be a seasonal drop.

Myspace and Bebo, numbers two and three of the big three social networks also suffered downturn in users, with the less popular networks like Windows Live Spaces actually seeing increased new visitors. This would suggest that it is in fact because of politicians and executives creating profiles, which has also happened on Myspace and Bebo.

No doubt if Facebook's dented credibility sees Live Spaces and the other small fish become big, then the same politicians will create Live Spaces profiles. Today's youth may well run out of credible networks to visit and end up having to cyber-share their virtual community with the dastardly politicians.

Some believe the Facebook fall has been caused by its middle-aged and older users becoming alienated at the number of widgets and add-ins that didn't apply to their age group. This could be true, I remember when Facebook was all over the news, journalism.co.uk ran a story: Journalists Must have a Facebook profile, or something to that effect. It is true that more middle-aged and older people have profiles on Facebook than any of the other networks.

And it does stand to reason that eventually the network, created and maintained to appeal to today's youth would alienate its older members. Only time will tell if Facebook losing its older community will give Myspace and Bebo a fighting chance against the Facebook giant.