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Yang patted himself on the back for moving the company in a new direction during his recent CEO tenure. His full statement:
From founding this company to guiding its growth into a trusted global brand that is indispensible to millions of people, I have always sought to do what is best for our franchise. When the board asked me to become CEO and lead the transformation of the company, I did so because it was important to re-envision the business for a different era to drive more effective growth. Having set Yahoo on a new, more open path, the time is right for me to transition the CEO role and our global talent to a new leader. I will continue to focus on global strategy and to do everything I can to help Yahoo realize its full potential and enhance its leading culture of technology and product excellence and innovation.
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And surprisingly, EFF doesn't necessarily want Microsoft to also offer refunds. After Microsoft shuttered MSN Music, the company announced last spring that it would stop issuing DRM keys. After being criticized, Microsoft decided to continue supporting its music for three more years. McSherry said that Microsoft's decision ensures that customers get what they paid for. That's all EFF wanted.
"In both cases, each of the companies has been forced to acknowledge they must do right by their customers," McSherry said. "I do hope that any other vendor (selling DRM-protected media), learns a lesson. They all must live up to the conditions that they set when they sold their music."
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Yahoo! Inc. , a leading global Internet company, announced today that it will begin a limited test of Google Inc.'s AdSense for Search service, which will deliver relevant Google ads alongside Yahoo!'s own search results. The test will apply only to traffic from yahoo.com in the U.S. and will not include Yahoo!'s extended network of affiliate or premium publisher partners. The test is expected to last up to two weeks and will be limited to no more than 3% of Yahoo! search queries.
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Our Board has reviewed your most recent letter with regard to the unsolicited proposal you made to acquire Yahoo! on January 31, 2008.
Our Board carefully considered your unsolicited proposal, unanimously concluded that it was not in the best interests of Yahoo! and our stockholders, and rejected it publicly on February 11, 2008. Our Board cited Yahoo!'s global brand, large worldwide audience, significant recent investments in advertising platforms and future growth prospects, free cash flow and earnings potential, as well as its substantial unconsolidated investments, as factors in its decision.
At the same time, we have continued to make clear that we are not opposed to a transaction with Microsoft if it is in the best interests of our stockholders. Our position is simply that any transaction must be at a value that fully reflects the value of Yahoo!, including any strategic benefits to Microsoft, and on terms that provide certainty to our stockholders.
Since disclosing our Board's position with respect to your proposal, we have presented our three-year financial and strategic plan to our stockholders, which supports our Board's determination that your unsolicited proposal substantially undervalues Yahoo!. Those meetings with our stockholders have also provided us an opportunity to hear their views.
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Yahoo said in a responding statement that its board "will evaluate this proposal carefully and promptly, in the context of Yahoo's strategic plans, and pursue the best course of action to maximize long-term value for shareholders." The deal comes as Microsoft and Yahoo have both struggled to compete against Google. Microsoft didn't mention Google by name in its announcement, but it did indicate that its acquisition bid was aimed squarely at its rival. "Today, the market is increasingly dominated by one player, who is consolidating its dominance through acquisition," Microsoft said. "Together, Microsoft and Yahoo can offer a credible alternative."
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ahoo!'s support of the ASF stemmed from its work with the Apache HTTP Server and Lucene projects. Today, several members of Yahoo!'s development teams are active, long-term code contributors to Apache Hadoop, the open source platform that makes it possible to efficiently process vast amounts of data on a cluster of commodity hardware. Leading the industry in supporting free and open software for building the next-generation of Internet-scale web services, Yahoo! is contributing to an open source version of these powerful tools which are freely available to anyone who needs them. In addition, Yahoo! is committed to advancing the state-of-the-art in distributed computing through the incubation of new Apache projects.
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As expected, Yahoo posted disappointing second-quarter financial results on Tuesday and lowered its guidance for the remainder of the year. The company cited continuing slowed growth in display advertising and bigger-than-expected declines in search affiliate sales. As Google pulls further and further ahead in the ad market war, Yahoo executives keep promising big things. But so far, it appears, they're just promises, and vague ones at that.
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With 250 million users, Yahoo Mail is the largest global e-mail provider and the largest in the U.S., according to comScore. The unlimited storage will begin rolling out globally in May, and Yahoo expects to have all of its customers covered within a month, except for China and Japan. "We will continue working with these markets on their storage plans," Kremer said.
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"We've been publicly trying to convince record labels that they should be selling MP3s for a while now," writes Yahoo Music blogger Ian Rogers. "DRM has a cost. It's very expensive for companies like Yahoo! to implement. We'd much rather have our engineers building better personalization, recommendations, playlisting applications, community apps, etc, instead of complex provisioning systems which at the end of the day allow you to burn a CD and take the DRM back off, anyway."