Blogs

Media titan Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corp., made news today by making it clear that he's no longer entertaining the notion of a combination with Yahoo as a means of helping the Internet company fend off Microsoft's unsolicited acquisition bid. Here's an extended excerpt from Murdoch's comments on the topic, as gleaned from the webcast of his appearance at the Bear Stearns 2008 Media Conference.

Q: You've shown some interest in possibly combining with Yahoo as your portal. What would be the benefits of putting together Yahoo and MySpace?

Murdoch: Oh, it'd be fun to beat Microsoft. No, we're not going to get into a fight with Microsoft. They've got a lot more money than us. ... It's quite unreal. You've got two giants in this space. You've got Microsoft and you've got Google. Google has invented ... and keep reinventing a great search engine, which has over 60 percent of the audience here and over 90 percent of the audience in Europe ... and they've never promoted it. It's just sort of word of mouth, keeps growing. Yahoo missed out. They bought Overture and then because they came to too many meetings like this and said, we've got to talk about our quarterly figures, they never spent any money on Overture for two years and Google got right away from them. They're down to the low 20s share of market. ... Equally, MSN has 10 percent of the market. Microsoft feel they have to pay attention to Google, they're quite paranoid about it. They want to put the two together, get 30 percent to just themselves and build on that platform. And it'll be, you know, it'll be a lot of fun to watch.

According to a Wall Street Journal report last week, Yahoo and Time Warner had stepped up their talks about a possible Yahoo-AOL combination, as another alternative to a Microsoft acquisition.