Ode an die Freude

Today everybody is talking about this. In a desperate effort of Microsoft to defeat Google in the Internet business battle, the company founded by Bill Gates offered an astronomic amount of money to aquire Yahoo!. You can see Yahoo Press Release and Microsoft Announcement for further details.

At least in my case, hearing of this caused great surprise, specially after reading the news about Yahoo! laying off 1.000 employees (7% of the company staff) last week, after announcing a 23 percent profits decrease in Q4 2007. Maybe it is no surprise Microsoft striking again against Yahoo!. Now that the company has admitted this profits fall, they consider the company value is less than a couple of months ago. No matter what, today Yahoo! stocks has risen almost 60% in Nasdaq.

What will happen next ? What will the Board of Directors at Yahoo! decide ?

It's no news that the growth of Internet projects these last years and the sudden and surprising success of many of them (i.e. Flickr, YouTube, Facebook) have given place to a new rush of web startups and a new version of the web...Web 2.0. VCs and young entrepreneurs are moving fast to come first with their ideas and projects and the challenge is quite attractive.

But many others still remember the dot-com-boom in year 2000 and forecast a new ending for this Web 2.0 excitement. Clearly, the author of this video is one of them, isn't he ?

What do you think ?