The world of IT is a lot like the world of football.
In much the same way that investors giving their public backing to a management is usually a sure-fire sign that the company will be sold off in slices by the end of the year, so a football manager getting a vote of confidence from his board is a guarantee he'll be putting the sheepskin coat away and handing back the keys to his company car within the month.
Last week News Corporation boss Rupert Murdoch publicly rubbished reports that his company wanted to cut a deal with Yahoo, in light of Microsoft's move on the business.
This week, it's all change and we now know the companies are talking about a potential deal, one that would likely involve News Corp swapping MySpace, some garden furniture and a nice lamp for a handy blocking stake in the internet company.
Such a move makes sense for everyone, except the boys from Redmond.
News Corp surprised most of us when it paid $580 million (£290 million), a fortune, for MySpace back in 2005. We thought it had overpaid, but time has instead revealed it bought a bargain, as the value of social networking sites have risen rapidly. The thing is, News Corp doesn't really know how to take MySpace forward.
Yahoo wants and needs a social networking site to add to its stable. Its in-house development effort, Yahoo 360, flopped and was quietly binned at the end of 2007. MySpace is the logical fit and Yahoo has the expertise to develop and expand it, as well as plug in its other assets such as mail and photo hosting. Selling ads on MySpace, currently handled by arch rival Google, is also a lucrative part of the MySpace package for Yahoo.
Watch this space, this saga is far from over.
* Don't forget to have a look at our Mobile World Congress coverage (http://newsletter.itpro.co.uk/c/17C7mRyz6hNlKyC0) for all the news and product announcements from the mobile phone industry's annual expo.
* We've made some changes to the way we list news in the newsletter, please tell us know what you think.
Chris Green
Editor
IT PRO
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