Slashdot Mirror
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."
What are the odds that the FTC would actually allow a merger like this anyway? I mean the evil power of Microsoft coupled with both of Yahoo's users could mean serious trouble.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Cue Shatner screaming "Icaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahn!"
Program Intellivision!
I'm not even convinced that this is a legitimate play by Icahn to make MS/Yahoo be more competitive with Google. If I'd have a billion dollars to invest, and I'd know that a merger would pump a company's stock price by 72%, I'd try to buy enough influence to make that happen. Icahn would make out like a bandit even if MS/Yahoo go down in flames the day after the deal is signed.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
If Microsoft does to yahoo what it did to hotmail and other companies, google's number 1 competitor is history.
I can only imagine what would happen by taking yahoo's infrastructure off free bsd and putting it on windows.
Google might just be loving this.
Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens to be particular about who it makes friends with.
I had given up hope that Microsoft would fire their legendary footgun at a Microwho? deal. I hope they blow all their available cash on this.
The synergy of this opportunity rivals a .com bubble for the ability to vanquish vast quantities of value.
Now I can look forward to reading about this in the news.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
He doesn't care about a merger, he wants Yahoo to pay him to fuck off. Look up "greenmail" on wikipedia.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
You really think he's that stupid?
I don't think Icahn actually believes what he is claiming. He's just claiming it so that he can make even more boatloads of cash.
The Yahoo deal would have made a lot of people like Icahn richer. They take the profits, run and do they really care what happens to Yahoo? No they don't.
If you think the deal doesn't make sense, then the people who should worry should be the people owning Microsoft shares.
The founders of Yahoo may not like their baby being destroyed in the long run, but that's what happens when you take a company public - it's no longer 100% in your hands.
Though luck Icahn, betting on a single stock is stupid, go back to your books and study what "idiosyncratic risk" means.
What offer is this idiot talking about?
From TFA: "I and many of your shareholders strongly believe that a combination between Yahoo and Microsoft would form a dynamic company"
Microsoft, on the other hand, says it is no longer interested http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/may08/05-03letter.mspx
...the big cheese until a couple of guys in a garage fucked it up for them. Yahoo failed to adapt.
Microsoft was the big cheese until they fucked it up themselves by releasing an unstable (moreso than they usually do) product. They'll probably fail to learn their lesson.
Merging a company full of fuckups with a company full of fuckups will still give you a company full of fuckups - just bigger. Even so, Google doesn't have its own OS, and that would significantly contribute to Yahoosofts's power. (I'd say Microhoo, but it sounds dirty.)
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Even before Apple's iPhone came out and smacked Moto's RAZR out of the park, it was clear that Moto needed to be doing R&D for the next-gen handsets. Oh, and you might want to keep some cash around in case of a rainy day. Icahn got handed his hat. And Moto did a bunch of weird acquisitions.
These days, it's raining pretty hard at Moto. I'm sure that pile of cash is helping them through the lean times.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying: Carl Icahn is a vocal, over-exposed pain in the ass. Whenever he talks, put your hand over your wallet, and pay very careful attention to what he's doing with his own.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Simply put, in a few months the M$=B$ PR machine would rewrite history, add Yahoo market share and revenue to MSN's lack of market share and revenue and then claim all those gains for MSN as a result of Ballmer's skill, rather than simply buying those numbers in at a loss.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
You have to understand the economics of the situtation to understand why this would probably be a good combination. Yahoo has a very large web audience, but has had difficulty generating advertising revenue from it, i.e. its technology isn't very good, so it isn't making as much money selling advertising as it otherwise could. Microsoft has the opposite problem, i.e. good technology that can convert traffic into advertising revenue, but it was much too late to the game, so it lacks a sufficiently large audience, and there's no reason for Yahoo or Google users to switch (even assuming Microsoft's content is as good, which is questionable).
A Microsoft/Yahoo combination (assuming it's even on the cards any longer from Microsoft's view) would allow Microsoft to replace Yahoo's ineffective technology with Microsoft's superior technology, whilst keeping Yahoo's popular content and websites. Google already has both high traffic and the technology to generate a high amount of advertising revenue from it, which is why Microsoft and Yahoo really can't compete in advertising on their own: Microsoft needs a bigger audience and Yahoo needs better technology. This is the logic behind Yahoo's approach to Google too (i.e. combining Yahoo's audiences with Google's superior advertising technology), but it's nevertheless insane from a business point of view, because in almost every area Yahoo operates, Google is its chief competitor. It really looks like a principal-agent issue, with Yahoo management more interested in securing their own power than in doing what's best for the shareholders who employ them.
If the Yahoo employees behind the company's lagging technology are less than thrilled about a Microsoft takeover, I can certainly understand why: Microsoft have no need of Yahoo's inferior technology, only its audience, so a lot of Yahoo engineers are surplus to requirements. At best these engineers will end up working on technology designed by someone else (i.e. Microsoft's current technology), and at worst they'll lose their jobs. That doesn't mean the deal doesn't make a huge amount of sense for Yahoo shareholders, and the long-run viability of Yahoo as a whole, which it does. If Yahoo continues to be run by inept management, and continues to use technology that isn't competitive with its rivals, it's only a matter of time before it fails, and then these employees will lose their jobs anyway.
So according to this guy:
...
Microsoft + Yahoo = "Dynamic" ?
I think he's way off base. If Microsoft is going to be a Dynamic Duo with anyone, it would be more likely some organization that thinks like them and can compliment their business practices, such as:
Microsoft + Halliburton
Microsoft + SCO (oops, already happened)
Microsoft + Phillip Morris
Microsoft + the Mafia
Microsoft + Dow Chemical
Microsoft + Exxon Mobile
"Microsoft has the opposite problem, i.e. good technology that can convert traffic into advertising revenue, but it was much too late to the game, so it lacks a sufficiently large audience..."
What is the "good technology" from Microsoft?
I just used Microsoft's Live.com to search for "aardvark". Interesting: Google returns a link to Firefox's Aaadvark add-on as the second entry. But Microsoft's live.com never lists the Firefox extension in the first 10 pages.
Can Microsoft be trusted not to be adversarial to customer interests in its search results? Apparently the answer is a big NO. Just that one random search convinced me to never use live.com.