Category Archives: Doing Business

Doing Business, Strategy

On takeovers going hostile

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Google terms Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid to acquire Yahoo as hostile, in its official blog.

The openness of the Internet is what made Google — and Yahoo! — possible. A good idea that users find useful spreads quickly. Businesses can be created around the idea. Users benefit from constant innovation. It’s what makes the Internet such an exciting place.

So Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.

So what is a hostile takeover anyway?

When a bidder makes an offer for another company, it will usually inform the board of the target beforehand. If the board feels that the offer is such that the shareholders will be best served by accepting, it will recommend the offer be accepted by the shareholders. A takeover would be considered “hostile” if (1) the board rejects the offer, but the bidder continues to pursue it, or (2) if the bidder makes the offer without informing the board beforehand

More at
1. Wikipedia
2. HowStuffWorks.com

Doing Business

Missing iPhones

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Some 800,000 to 1 million iPhones had been unlocked by the end of 2007, the sources say. The high end of that range far outpaces most analysts’ assumptions of 750,000 unlocked phones. The vast majority of those phones are trickling into nations around the world where Apple has yet to sign up a local carrier—especially China, say industry sources (BusinessWeek.com, 12/4/07). “In my travels around the world, two out of three iPhones I’ve seen outside of the U.S. have been unlocked,” says Richard Doherty, director at consultant Envisioneering Group. “In China, nine out of 10 phones are hacked.”

More at Businessweek

Doing Business, Marketing, Success Stories

Story behind iPhone

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The demo was not going well.

Again.

It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple’s top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple’s boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn’t just buggy, it flat-out didn’t work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, “We don’t have a product yet.”

The effect was even more terrifying than one of Jobs’ trademark tantrums. When the Apple chief screamed at his staff, it was scary but familiar. This time, his relative calm was unnerving. “It was one of the few times at Apple when I got a chill,” says someone who was in the meeting.

More at Wired.com: The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry