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If fortune turns against you, even jelly breaks your tooth - Persian proverb
Microsoft to snap up Greenfield Online
MICROSOFT IS SET to acquire Greenfield Online, including its European price comparison subsidiary site Ciao, for $17.50 per share, totalling around $486 million in cash.
The Vole is only really interested in the Ciao site, which it wants to use to further extend its search and e-commerce services in Europe by integrating into the Live Search platform.
According to Comscore, Ciao gets around 26.5 million unique visitors per month across seven countries, and gets up-to-date price information from thousands of online merchants. The site also has found five million user reviews.
"Integrating Ciao's capabilities into Live Search will provide a strong launchpad for our commercial search offer in Europe and enhance our e-commerce offering on MSN," said John Mangelaars, vice president of Consumer and Online for Microsoft in EMEA.
Because Redmond is only after Ciao, it has found an unnamed financial buyer for Greenfield Online's Internet survey parts.
Assuming all the regulatory and customary conditions are met, both transactions are expected to be done and dusted before the end of the year. µ
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Remember when Hotmail was innovative and had few adverts, now look at it since MS bought it. Ciao will no doubt have adverts all over it, the useful parts will be hard to see, and I will be lost when using it because of all the gimmicky crap everywhere. Google are kicking MS's ass and MS can't understand why. There are no adverts on Google main page, that's one good reason. Google has no clutter, another good reason. Google is fast and fairly good at what it does, and is painless to use, unlike MSN sites. Did you know that Vista Email doesn't work with Hotmail or IMAP. MS are such a bunch of fools. So what are people to do when they find this out? I have been recommending Thunderbird Email (free, does Hotmail, gmail, yahoomail and IMAP). I wonder are MS doing the right thing or slowly killing themselves.