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Yahoo To Reject Microsoft Bid
Many outlets are echoing a subscribers-only report in the Wall Street Journal that Yahoo's board has decided to reject Microsoft's takeover offer. The NYTimes offers the only other independent reporting so far confirming this claim. The report says that Yahoo will formally reject the offer in a letter on Monday, since they believe it "massively undervalues" the company. Microsoft offered $31 per share, a 62% premium on the stock price at the time, for Yahoo; but the latter believes that no offer below $40 per share is tenable. The AP has some background on Yahoo's options in responding to the bid.
Either:
1. Microsoft ups their offer. Yahoo board indicated they wouldn't consider anything under $40.
2. Microsoft walks away. Shareholders revolt after stock drops big time.
3. Microsoft wages a proxy fight and tries to win over shareholders over the board's head.
(3) is the most likely outcome. Microsoft already said something like "we won't take no for an answer".
You're ignoring, they're offering $31 "equivelent" in Microsoft stocks. Not in cash in hand. How will the stock market respond when suddenly there's this extra 20% in loose Microsoft stocks floating out there?
Hello stock price freefall!
$40 as a minimum is quite reasonable when you consider the massive devaluation which will occur the moment the deal goes through.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
The problem with American business and the financial "industry" built around it is that there is actually no interest at all in sustainable business, but rather exponential profit growth at all cost, even the death of the company itself. The company dies, the money vultures move on to the next target.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
It's possible to learn a lot by examining the world around you. For example, what am I bid for this half-eaten, moldy burrito? I am accepting no offers below $40.
Microsoft has proven, over many years, that it does not know how to run a search engine. Buying Yahoo will not magically make Microsoft smarter, especially since Yahoo has proven, over many years, that...
As a share holder in Microsoft I think that Microsoft has way better things to do with my retained earnings than pay too much for nothing right before the whole economy tanks.
He's an idea. Sell you stupid DRM pipe dreams down the river of wasted time and turn into what you should be, a DIVIDEND paying LOW GROWTH utility company. Make a good operating system with no bells or whistles that will pass any anti-trust case, sell it for a low enough price that the trouble of downloading a bit torrent crack isn't worth it. Make it so I can add/remove modules over the Internet at will for low low prices. Then make a a version that looks fucking fantastic and sell it like a Mac for a premium to fanboys and people who think translucent colored baubles are the shit.
Someone over there has finally woken up. I have been teaching Office 2007 and for god's sake it's a great product. 90% of the things that have made want to skull fuck the assholes in the Office department to death are gone. The menu system is great. The Page layout break controls are great. The automatic formating is now controllable. Best of fucking all you can now set the default action for paste to be text only.
I want Microsoft to stop being a bitch like Sony. (Don't FUCKING sue yourself.) Don't get delusions of being a media company or and Internet company you twits. Give me my fucking retained earnings as a dividend, make Office for a profit, make Server for a large profit, and make Windows so it works underwater in space, in the future, across standards, platforms, without a hoot because it is a god damn utility that doesn't give a fuck because everyone has to use it and doesn't hate it because it just fucking does its job come hell or high water.
While I don't disagree that Microsoft is in a slow downward spiral. I'm not sure I understand the rest of your post.
Yahoo has sharks circling. This is because it's dying much faster than MS. Yahoo, is essentially an empty brand name, content, and a database -- i.e. just like AOL before it. It has executives who have never understood its client base, nor cared for one single second long enough to find out what they want. It is astonishing that it survived the 1st dotcom crash -- it was in trouble then. Even now, in its final throes, they trundle out yet another doomed to fail product in "unlimited" webhosting. Except it is not unlimited. Just another Yahoo lie that will backfire like all the rest.
The only bad thing about this is that Yahoo is so toxic that it may have brought MS down faster. Nevertheless Yahoo will be a dead name before MS is, and it won't take 5 years. Both are, however, definitely dying.
I don't get why people are bitching at Yahoo! over this. Do you WANT Microsoft to own them? I don't care WHY they turned it down, I'm just glad they did, I personally don't want to see it happen at all! I'm not even sure if the FTC would like it much.
Pancakes. Oh I blew it.
Well, it looks like we'll find out what the shareholders want soon enough. Since Microsoft doesn't look like they're taking no for an answer, my guess is that they're going to try and win the shareholders over without even bothering with Yahoo's board.
Why do I have the overwhelming sense that something immensely stupid is about to occur? I've got my popcorn ready. Who knows, SCO did it...they banked everything on a whim. Maybe M$ will follow suit and bank everything on a hostile takeover. I wouldn't put it past Ballmer. But with the insanity that seems to be taking firm hold of the world and everything in it, I wouldn't be surprised if Ballmer, in a monumental display of egotistical machismo, tries to take down Yahoo, and his own company with it.
yahoo shows this in their insane logic that shares in their company are worth 2x what they are selling for in the market.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Just goes to show me that even on the off chance I would want to work for MS, had an interview, and was offered a position that I would not take it after hearing that. To have a CEO who can't use professional language is just showing that the company needs to look elsewhere for a CEO, not to mention it shows his lack of variety and knowledge of the English language. But maybe they have the cream of the crop already. After all, how many CEOs have morals and ethics?
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
This thing is not going down for $45 a share (60 billion). This is going down for $34 - $35. MSFT might be loaded but they will not go all the way to the mat. If MSFT makes a $35 offer and its not accepted...Microsoft won't have to wage a proxy fight, YHOO instititutional shareholders will do it for them. Yang and the board own like less then 6% of the company. While YHOO may point back to its high $35 price in November...a whole lot of stocks were high in November and tech is out of favor right now. MSFT backing out would take this stock to $17 in a hurry and is why ultimately MSFT wins and wins at a much lower price.
whereas microsoft is reliant on...?
An entrenched monopoly on x86 Operating Systems where the likes of Dell must bend over and sign their souls away and the industry leading Office Suite?
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
If it were a "real" company, like, say, Netscape (was), the Empire could cut off its air supply. Same with "Linux" (_not_ a "real company", doesn't need to make money or stay "in business" in order to survive and continue to challenge The Monopoly). "Real Companies"(tm)(r)(c) can be eliminated using "real" monopoly business abuse. This is what _really_ has SteveB pissed off and frustrated to the point where he's reduced to swearing and throwing things.
He has viable competitors out here, about which he can't do a fsckin' thing.
Oh, and _zero_ market loyalty, after ten years of abuse. Make that negative numbers...
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
This also explains why oil is currently at $90 a barrel and why it jumped ~$20 in a few weeks time. Even though the poor are having trouble getting to work to make money the high and mighty rich investors are making profits on oil. Just another day of work for them.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
MS bid $31. Yahoo counters with "Not a penny under $40". MS counters with $35 or just does a hostile takeover.
1/2 of 1% of a company's outstanding shares being traded in a given day is a VERY high volume. This means that even on a big news day, well over 99% of shareholders still think owning the stock is a good idea. They value it therefore at some amount higher than the going price.
In order to get these people to sell to a buyout offer, you have to make it go from 1/2 of 1% thinking that they should sell to 50%+1. To convince all the shareholders between .5% and 50.0000001% to sell means you have to raise the price, substantially.
This sig has not been evaluated by the FDA. It is not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any disease.
> Ballmer is correct to an extent - google and yahoo ARE a house of
> cards, completely reliant on the fickle advertising market and pumped
> up share prices.
This would be the same market Ballmer proposes to run Microsoft into debt in order to buy into?
c.
Log in or piss off.
"completely reliant on the fickle advertising market"
When is somebody going to step back and look at this phrase? Yeah, come to think of it, every media format on Earth, from newspapers to radio stations to magazines to TV stations, has companies that are completely reliant on the fickle advertising market. Been going on for 200 years+ of American capitalism; I don't see it stalling any time soon.
I challenge you to show how Yahoo is a sustainable business. Before the MS offer, they just announced that they would have to fire 1000 employees. The company's revenues year over year are shrinking because their management cannot find a way to translate all of their site traffic into money. They have a history of failing to meet their own projections. At the very least this a poorly run company, and with the coming recession, I do not think its sustainability is out of the question.
Second as an individual that owns stock, and thus is one of these "money vultures," why should I or any investor want to own Yahoo's stock, outside of takeover speculation. The company offers no dividend, which means the only return on investment I will see in it is from the company's growth, something it has clearly failed to predict, manage, or deliver on.
You claim that the entire financial industry is built on "exponential growth" but you fail to ignore the fact that Yahoo abd most tech stocks choose to hold their stock out as a growth stock, meaning they can only justify their stock price by *gasp* growing. If Yahoo were too come out tomorrow, declare a dividend (like say Altria), and pay some of the $1.5 billion dollars in cash they have to their shareholders, than their stock would finally have some intrinsic worth NOT tied to their rate of growth. (Note: For an explaination of growth stocks vs. value stocks, check this link out.)
The sun beams down on a brand new day, No more welfare tax to pay, Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light...
There are at least 3 search engines with quality competitive to google that are not yahoo.
If google started charging for search, would you seriously not investigate the nearly equally good alternatives?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
--- and a good many more who wish the joke could be retired along with the other long-since-gone-stale running gags that pass for humor on Slashdot.
Sure he would ... he's just saying that Google has value, that's all. And I agree: no library is of much use without an index.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Advertising may be fickle, but it's a constant.
The market may rise and fall, but endeavor and scarcity are constant.
Google, by offering a simple utility, by openly indicating a "sponsored link" while Yahoo and Altavista quietly took money to do so, created a successful business model. Younger users may not remember to what insane degree AOL exploited screen real-estate-- I was inadverdantly clicking ads three times a minute just trying to navigate. The immediate attraction of Google, Craig's List and Wikipedia's attention to white space was a welcomed reprieve. By Ballmer's standard, a true business model is one that exploits captive consumers-- like an airport, like Microsoft, like AOL. What angers Ballmer and others is their lack of control in the face of innovation.
Would were! Should is! Could be! And live a hundred times three.
Google is reliant on the web and the web is basically what is killing MS. With high-speed internet MS is just about obsolete, in a few hours you can download a Linux OS that offers just as much if not more then what MS offers not to mention if you know where to look you can download XP/Vista and get a serial code to work with it. As for Office, Open Office has become the office suite of choice for those who see no need to spend $99 on a single program. Google also is cross-platform, most software works on Windows, Linux and Mac and naturally Google search works on any browser on any platform without proprietary addons. Google is just a natural product of the web which is what is killing MS more then any software, more then Linux is, more then Apple can ever hope to. MS represents the 80s to early 90s model of software, software that is bought and sold by companies, Google is a service and most softwiare is free to all (as in beer) and because they figured out how to make internet advertising successful, they don't annoy the users by displaying pop-ups and too much Flash.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
I find most discussion only focuses on search. Certainly this is part of Microsoft's strategy. What is more important for Yahoo! is it's other services. Yahoo! groups, mail, TV, calendars, widgets, and lots of other properties.
Is it possible Microsoft is after these? Like Palm wasn't after BeOS?
What would the acquisition of these other properties do for Microsoft? For Google? Google could sell the search and advertising off and get a lot of mileage off of the other parts
I think it's all this other IP that puts Yahoo! in a much better position then the narrow "Search Merger" view provides.
I love my computer -- You make me feel alright (Bad Religion)
Not a criticism or flamebait, so please don't take it that way.
I have a yahoo account (don't really use it), but I primary think of them as a search engine. Used them until after google came along, but joined the pack.
So based on that, here's my question - _if_ Yahoo is a search engine, and _because_ you point how they're not a sustainable business, then perhaps the real deal is that your post has three links in it, none of them from Yahoo. In fact, you use google as the first link to find out / prove how Yahoo was doing with its employment.
No one pointed out the irony until now. It's that proof in and of itself of the trouble Yahoo _really_ has? Advertising requires mindshare or is meant to build it - whichever way you want, you just proved _something_.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
Somebody can't count.
MS was a customer hostile enterprise (eventually proved criminal, time and time again) from the day Gates crawled out of bed and set it up in 1975, with mission: Enrich ME, fuck everyone else. (Remember the anti-hobbyist memo (first of many famous incriminating memos)? The leopard doesn't change its spots.)
I make that 32 years. The cost to civilisation is incalculable, and we'll be paying for decades to come. Millions of lives are made worse by Windows and every other worthless MS product, every day.
Ballmer was hired and retained to continue the disgusting legacy.
you had me at #!
-$12 commission. You can do the same thing in Vegas with a $1000. IE you bet $50 a day, and double down until you hit once. Even with $1600 it would be on average 1 month until you lost your initial $1600, by then you would have won $1550, so if you reinvested that you would likely make a year until you lost everything. The casinos hate this, not because they lose money at the table, as many think (eventually they get their share cause the 0, 00 put the odds in their favor eventually,) But these are disciplined gamblers who don't bet enough to be worth the casinos time. Also with comps, the time in the casino they assume more money than $50 a day average will be at stake, so they lose some off the table.
Similar with you "Vampire" strategy, this type of betting actually stabilizes a stocks value, would slow it's growth but also slow any decline. So not really bad for the stock generally, again it may upset the Mutual funds,etc. Because their is a need for the majority of $ invested to be educated to keep a stock in line. These non fundamental purchases encourage movement for movement, not the preferred movement for fundamentals that is supposed to keep the markets efficient.
"Both companies [Sun and Novell] pretty much lost out whenever they took on Microsoft".
I thought you were going to say, "... when they took on Eric Schmidt". Novell was at the top of the network software market. Through a lot of foolish moves, like buying Word Perfect for $1.1 billion, if I remember correctly, in 1994, Novell became "Who is Novell?"
I don't have any idea how much Eric Schmidt was responsible for the downfall of Novell. He became CEO of Novell in 1997. By 1999, "Novell had lost its dominant market position".
The new thing here is the internet, and people becoming used to the idea that you don't need to look at ads in order to make use of it. How many of us AdBlock? How many people have switched to Firefox after seeing how wonderfully effective it is?
You use radio, newspapers and TV as examples of ad-supported media that has stood the test of time. As a single data point, I can tell you that I haven't listened to commercial radio since early high school (around '95 or so). After I started listening to Triple J (government-funded station with no ads) I found commercial radio to be almost painful in comparison, what with the constant obnoxious loud adverts, and annoying promos crowing about how they're doing an ad-free hour or whatever. Now that my and JJJ's music taste have diverged I mostly listen to my own collection. I stopped watching TV a long time ago too; I download any programmes I want to watch because it's more convenient and don't constantly interrupt my viewing with ads. I've never even bought a newspaper; if I want news I can find it online.
The big thing is that once you stop watching or hearing ads for a while, when you do encounter them you find them really, really annoying -- and this just makes you want to avoid them even more, even if it requires a bit of extra effort in order to do so. Any company that relies on ads is in a very scary position because the fact is the vast majority of people don't simply "not like" advertising, they actually dislike it. When your primary product is something people not only don't want but actively seek to avoid, you're going to have problems.
While the yahoo board would obviously be tempted with a cash only offer, getting stuck with M$ stock at this time would be nothing the Yahoo board could, in all good conscience, recommend to its share holders. Oddly enough, a substantial portion of the rise in Yahoo share price that resulted from M$'s bid will remain because of M$ admission of defeat in the Internet market place, simultaneously that admission of defeat does not bode well for M$.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen