Microsoft News Tracker

Yesterday Microsoft held their annual Financial Analyst Meeting for 2008 and while you can view the full video and (nearly unreadable) transcripts of the presentations, it was mostly predictable fare. However, there were a few newsworthy nuggets::

Steve Ballmer (Chief Executive Officer) 

• Yahoo: "it didn’t work out. Fine, we’re done. We can move on. Does that mean that nobody will ever talk to anybody again? I suspect the answer to that question is also no. It’s a long time in a big world, but we’re comfortable proceeding as we are on our own with our people, with our strategy, independent innovation and I think what we really still have in search and advertising is a two-horse race [Google and Microsoft - ed.]."
• Facebook: Satya Nadella who helped Ballmer handle the online business (since Kevin Johnson was missing) revealed an extension of the Facebook advertising relationship:

  "One last thing I wanted to also talk about is an extension of our Facebook relationship where we are extending it to Search and Page Search. We will be providing an API to Facebook where they will create a rich search experience, including a Web search for the Facebook users. And that’s something that they will launch in the fall, working with us, and it’ll carry both our Web results as well as our Page Search advertising."

Bill Veghte (SVP, Online Services)

• Windows Live: Windows Live Wave 3 will ship this year
• Internet Explorer 8: IE8 will arrive in 2008 with a beta in "a month or so."

Chris Liddell (CFO)

• Yahoo again: "I think the chances of us buying Yahoo! on a full acquisition basis are so small that they are essentially negligible. I never say never. Who knows in years to come. But a full acquisition certainly in the timeframe and sort of economics that we had previously thought essentially makes no sense.

  We still have the possibility of doing a search transaction, which we think makes some economic sense. If I had a worry it’s the parallel paths continue, and about the time Yahoo decides that search deal makes sense for them is probably about the time that we have committed to our own plan so much that it may no longer make sense for us."