Ballmer On Yahoo Miss: "Sometimes You're Lucky" (MSFT, YHOO)

Steve Ballmer says he feels lucky not to have bought Yahoo before the market crash.

At the Web 2.0 Summit, Ballmer answered the question from John Battelle:

"Ask any CEO who might have bought something before the market crashed....Hallelujah. Putting everything else aside, the market fell apart....Sometimes, you're lucky."

But he does think Yahoo has real value, and he's happy that the Yahoo search deal went through, as it's helped Bing get close to 30% market share. That's compared with about 7% share when Ballmer was last here three years ago.

He also offered a challenge to all search users:

"Take any search you want, try it out on Bing, try it out on Google. 70% of the time you probably won't care. 15% of the time you'll probably like us better, and 15% of the time you'll probably like the other guy better."

That's just on straight relevance, not considering user interface and other differences.

 

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See Also:

• Windows Tablets Coming In Q3 2012, Says Report
• Ballmer Thinks You Have To Be A Computer Scientist To Use Android
• Microsoft's First Act As The New Owner Of Skype

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~3/spI3_0Etw9w/ballmer-web-2-2011-10

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