Microsoft Writing Off Nearly All of the $6.3 Billion it Paid For aQuantive

Post by look_lookatme » Tue, Jul 03, 2012, 2:54 PM UTC

eli wrote: post #37

look_lookatme wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenX Enterprise is definitely being pushed hard. They also continue to work on OpenX Market, their exchange. OpenX is not good, but yeah a good number of people are using them.

I'm not surprised that many people use OpenX -- I'm surprised at how little competition there is for ad servers. Last year I wanted to build an ad server that could integrate with legacy backend systems and add some custom targeting logic, but I couldn't figure out a good way to do it. All the popular ad servers are either crappy, too limited, too expensive, or some combinaton of the three.

http://www.adzerk.com/ seems to be the only real upstart in the game, as far as I can tell.

Post by mathattack » Wed, Jul 04, 2012, 12:23 PM UTC

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #41

Accounting question: Is this write off writing off the goodwill that was created by the merger?

Goodwill is the premium paid above the book value. It occurs because most corporate purchases occur above the value the acquired company has on the books. An example: My company has a book (accounting) value if $10 million. I sell it to you for $30 million. $20 million of that becomes an asset on your books of "Goodwill" - a catch-all for the brand value above and beyond my tangible assets. If at some point you don't think you can generate earnings to justify the premium, you write it down. This is what Microsoft did.

For a longer explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_(accounting)

Re: Microsoft Writing Off Nearly All of the $6.3 Billion it Paid For aQuantive

Re: Microsoft Writing Off Nearly All of the $6.3 Billion it Paid For aQuantive