Carl Icahn Takes on Yahoo's Board

narramissic and several others have written to point out that Carl Icahn has initiated a proxy battle with Yahoo's board of directors over their rejection of Microsoft's bid for the company in February. Icahn has purchased millions of Yahoo shares over the past week and assembled a group of nine other investors (including Mark Cuban) to persuade the board to resume talks with Microsoft. Yahoo remains unimpressed. Icahn's letter to Yahoo accuses: "It is unconscionable that you have not allowed your shareholders to choose to accept an offer that represented a 72% premium over Yahoo's closing price of $19.18 on the day before the initial Microsoft offer. I and many of your shareholders strongly believe that a combination between Yahoo and Microsoft would form a dynamic company and more importantly would be a force strong enough to compete with Google on the Internet."

Comments

The shaft

[dexomn]

Oh man. Microshaft AND yahoo, you can imagine the search results... and the "toolbar" that will occupy 400+MB of ram...

VRML buddy icons laid over broken XML... good god man!

Re:Why is it I know a merger won't be successful..

[mgblst]

Why is it that I know a merger between Yahoo and Microsoft won't be successful, but Steve Ballmer doesn't?

And what multi-million dollar business do you run? Personally you sound like someone who has absolutely no business experience at all.

So why Steve Ballmer know a merger would not be successful? For the obvious reasons...people don't know thing like this, they can make educated guesses, (or uneducated stupid statements like you have done), but knowing the future is hard. And I am going to make a bold statement here, that people in Microsoft have actually looked at this acquisition, and see a lot of value in it. They have actually looked at ways they can make/save money if they had Yahoo. They probably spend months on this.

Fucking moron.

Re:What is the "good technology" from Microsoft?

[fwarren]

That's because it takes 'lots of people who search for aardvark' in order to know that lots of people who search for aardvark might be searching for... Chicken and egg. Nice to see that it works in favor of somebody other than Microsoft for once.

I agree that the more people search, the better chance you have of digging through the searches and clicks to decide what is relevant. But do you really think that if more people search for aardvark then aaardvark and click through on Live Search. That Live Search will figure it out?

I would say past history has shown that Microsoft deserves it placement in search engine quality. They pump ads in as search results. They were to spend 150 million to write a better search engine. They still cant even match google.

It is like all of their products. Their search is "good enough" if you don't bother to look for anything else. If you look, their is always something that beats their products.