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Microsoft Offered $40 a Share For Yahoo
fistfullast33l writes "Bloomberg is reporting that a recently unsealed court case by shareholders against Yahoo reveals that Microsoft offered $40 a share for the Internet search company in January 2007 and Yahoo turned it down. We've extensively discussed Microsoft's bid for Yahoo earlier this year for $33 a share, which was rebuffed. Investor Carl Icahn has launched a proxy fight against Yahoo over the spurning of the Microsoft deal." CWmike notes Computerworld's coverage of the revelations: "The complaint places much of the blame on [Yahoo CEO Jerry] Yang, describing him as someone with a 'well-known' antipathy toward Microsoft who acted out of a personal interest to keep Yahoo independent. Something wrong with that? Oh, yeah... public company."
Actually, 82% of Yahoo's float is held by institutions and mutual funds.
Jerry Yang's job isn't to do whats good for Yahoo, it's to do whats good for the share holders. Maybe you forget that they are the people who actually own the company. Yang needs to demonstrate how Yahoo will deliver more than double its January value to it's shareholders.
That's part of the deal for taking public money, if you don't like the deal don't take the money.
Actually, what you're referring to is the "business judgment rule," which says that the Board's business judgment will not be challenged in court absent a showing of bad faith or being on both sides of a transaction. The Board is *required* to focus on maximizing wealth for the company's owners, i.e., the shareholders. However, under the "business judgment rule," the Board may be able to justify its decision to refuse a higher tender offer in that it better understands the long-term business implications of the company and thinks that not selling will be better off in the long run for shareholders.
That is true but provided you are sensible windows isn't all that expensive.
Per thier support lifecycle policy MS says they will offer security updates for at least 7 years after the release of the next version.
What that means is as long as you buy the latest version OEM (you can use downgrade rights if you don't want to run the new version yet) the PC will almost certainly have been retired before the version of windows it shipped with
Some companies end up paying a bit more (exactly how much more is hard to tell because details of volume license prices don't seem easy to find online) for windows because they want the extra flexibility volume licensing gives them (yes there are reimage rights but they are relatively restricted) but even then windows will be a pretty small proportion of the TCO of the machine.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register