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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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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)
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 #!
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