Yahoo News Is Bracing for a Day of Heavy Traffic

By BRIAN STELTER

Published: November 2, 2008

The festive red, white and blue graphics have been designed. The production rehearsals have been held. The Web servers have been adjusted in preparation for a great influx of traffic. Now Yahoo News is waiting for the election results to start streaming in.

Yahoo News, by some measures one of the most popular news Web sites in the country, has repeatedly broken its own traffic records during the election year. The news arm of the search engine expects Tuesday’s day of voting and Wednesday’s day-after to raise the bar higher still.

“Yahoo has taken its place as the great starting point for any big event,” said Neeraj Khemlani, the vice president for programming and development.

With an increasing number of people using the Internet for news, sites like Yahoo are treating election night as a prime programming occasion, the way the television networks do.

Web sites have introduced and refined new ways to track the election, from multiple streams of live video to real-time graphics of voting patterns. Perhaps the most significant innovations are the interactive maps of state-by-state polls and potential Electoral College outcomes. On Yahoo, users of the “Political Dashboard” spend an average of 10 minutes constructing red- and blue-state outcome and seeing how they match up to prior elections.

Web sites “put the data in the hands of the audience,” said Liz Lufkin, senior director for front page content. “You can see John King playing around with his groovy map on CNN, but you can do something similar on Yahoo.”

On Tuesday the election will dominate Yahoo’s home page. Users who search for terms like “Barack Obama” and “John McCain” will see links to Yahoo’s news and results at the top of the results.

Most of the material on Yahoo News comes from The Associated Press and third-party partners like ABC News and The Politico. Yahoo will simulcast the coverage of ABC News Now, the digital video arm of ABC News, which plans to go live from 7 p.m. until at least 11 p.m. The site will rely on The A.P.’s projections of winners in each state; its breaking news blog will acknowledge when the television networks make projections.

Helped by interest in the election, Yahoo News had 38 million visitors in September, according to Nielsen Online. Although Yahoo News usually ranks No. 1 in Nielsen’s list of online news outlets, MSNBC.com’s network of sites surpassed Yahoo in September with 43.2 million visitors. CNN.com’s network ranked third with 37.3 million visitors. (Another firm, comScore, placed Yahoo ahead of MSNBC.com for the same month.)

While television news has viewership spikes on major campaign days, news sites usually have bigger bumps the day after. “Prime time on the Internet is first thing in the morning,” Ms. Lufkin said. Aug. 29, the day after Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, was the highest traffic day in the 13-year history of Yahoo News, according to the site’s internal data, which recorded a 446 percent increase above normal days.

August had already been good to Yahoo. During the Olympics, Yahoo News drew more visitors than NBC’s site, even though NBC owned exclusive video rights to the Summer Games. By the end of September, Yahoo News had doubled the amount of traffic it had in all of 2004, according to internal data.

The site had 80 million page views on election day in 2004 and 142 million the day after, when John Kerry conceded to George W. Bush. “We expect to do twice and perhaps three times as much traffic in 2008,” Mr. Khemlani said.

The Battle for Microsoft’s Soul

And The Google-Yahoo-AOL Winner Is...Microsoft

Henry Blodget 

Shake your head at Microsoft's Internet futility all you want, but Steve Ballmer & Co. have won the latest round hands down.

True, this victory has come not through brilliant action, but brilliant--or at least fortunate--inaction. But as Warren Buffett is fond of noting, sometimes doing nothing is the smartest move you can make.

Ten months ago, Steve Ballmer was on the verge of handing over $50 billion of stock and cash for Yahoo, a deal that would have diluted the hell out of Microsoft shareholders, bought Microsoft a dying elephant, and ultimately have been a disaster.  Fortunately, Yahoo sniffed at the offer.

Six months or so ago, Ballmer tried twice to buy Yahoo's search business, after Yahoo rushed to Google to negotiate a lucrative search partnership to stave off the Microsoft acquisition bid.  The second offer, which still wasn't quite as good for Yahoo as the Google deal, would have paid Yahoo to permanently exit a business it has already lost (search engineering).  Again, fortunately, Yahoo sniffed at the offer.

And now Yahoo's stock has fallen to $12, ad spending is heading into the tank, the Google-Yahoo search partnership is all but dead, and Yahoo board members are trying to rekindle search talks with Microsoft.  Yahoo is also firing 1500+ employees, restructuring its business, and mired in endless negotiations with Time Warner over the fate of AOL.

So, what is likely to happen?

We would not be surprised if the following plan was being bandied about the executive suites in Redmond:

1. Let the Yahoo-Google deal fail. This will destroy any last bit of leverage that Yahoo has in a search negotiation.  A new Microsoft-Yahoo search deal would already have far better terms (for Microsoft) than Microsoft's second offer last summer.  The abandonment of the Yahoo-Google deal will remove any pretense of another Yahoo option.
2. Let Yahoo buy AOL and try to integrate it.  Given that Jerry appears to be choosing a death-by-a-thousand cuts restructuring strategy for Yahoo, it seems unlikely that he'll have the resolve to do what has to be done if Yahoo buys AOL, which is fire at least 4000 people from the combined company. As a result, the deal will probably be a disaster.
3. Buy the wreckage for $15-$20 a share (or less, depending on what happens to the business over the next six months).

Six months down the road, Google's position will be even more dominant, so regulators would probably wave a deal like this through. Microsoft would still have major challenges running the business (we would recommend a spinoff of all the Internet operations as a separate company), but global advertisers would be screaming for a viable Google alternative, and combining the operations of Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo would give them one.

The Battle for Microsoft’s Soul

by Steve Gillmor on November 2, 2008

So much of this long protracted struggle for political change has rubbed off on the tech community. In the partisan windup to this long election process, we’ve become almost inured to the fact that as much as things will continue to be the same, already the “choice” between the two candidates has produced one sure thing. That is, either of the two candidates represents fundamental change from the status quo, no matter how much you want to differentiate further.

So it is with the shift to the Cloud. Whether you’re betting on Google, or Amazon, or Microsoft, or less obviously Apple, IBM, Oracle, or Cisco, the sure thing is that Web services has gone main stream. If this is a horse race at the vendor level, it’s about each company’s ability to harness its innate strengths and migrate its weaknesses. Put another way, the battle is within, not between...

Ed: The depth of Silicon Valley and the superficial view from Wall Street.

Microsoft Live, Office, Dynamics, Explorer, SQL Server, Live Mesh, dotNet, Exchange, Sharepoint Moving to Azure Cloud Platform

Ed: Does Microsoft understand web 2.0? 

Mr. Ozzie is coordinating a massive shift to cloud computing.

• Applications like Dynamics (i.e. CRM, ERP), Office (i.e. Word, Excel, Powerpoint), and Live (i.e. email, messenger, spaces, search)
  
• Middleware services like dotNet, SQL server, Exchange server, Sharepoint
• Azure platform that integrates the parts over the cloud

Recently, Microsoft also announced:

• Windows 7 - an improved version of the problematic Vista
• Explorer 8 - bigger and better
• Hints of gesture-based Microsoft Mobile to fend off the iPhone

The Company intends to shift from heavy dependence on bundling, licensing, and selling software to earning subscription fees (SaaS) and ad-supported free usees like Hotmail. 

While Microsoft has the strength of their huge army, code base, customers, and cash - they also suffer the legacy that prevents nimble change. Authorization, authentication, accounting, and control issues that dominate the needs of enterprises conflict with the free flowing, fast changing conversations and interactions on the consumer web. Whereas the footprint of Windows, Office, Mobile, and Explorer gets larger - competitors like Google Chrome and Apple iPhone have succeeded with light weight clients on Linux derivations that load more quickly, consume less power, offer advanced features, change the standards for user interaction, and lower prices to consumers. 

iPhone will soon dominate smartphones. Explorer may soon lose majority share with browsers to Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. Notebooks may be emerging as a category of light-weight devices. Has Microsoft ceded the world of client devices to others - while trying to fully defend their dominance of backroom services? Will listening and responding to enterprise clients slow their move into the consumer web?

Competition is good for innovation. 

Is Azure a game-changer or simply too-little, too-late?

Microsoft's Manhattan Project

Posted by Dan Farber

This week Microsoft gave evidence that it will continue to be a major force for at least the next decade. The company outlined its products and strategies that more fully embrace the "cloud," such as the Azure set of cloud services; Web-based, lighter-weight versions of Microsoft Office applications; and the latest iteration of the Live Mesh middleware. Google may have won the search war but Microsoft isn't about to cede the global cloud to the search engine giant.

As in past epochs in its 33 year history, Microsoft ties its success to the developer community, having an army of loyal, or at least well or modestly compensated, software warriors. The Microsoft mantra is: "Build a platform and an ecosystem of developers, partners, fans and people willing to spend their money will follow." A compelling platform and the potential to reach a large audience of buyers, which Microsoft can deliver, attracts the developers, who build the applications and services that attract consumers and business users.

Microsoft also now understands that its platform must span every kind of device--PC, notebook, smartphone, car, home, etc.--and offline scenarios. Microsoft missed the Web search revolution, but it's not going to miss out on the much bigger revolution--the move to the cloud over the next two decades...