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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."
And isn't that what it's all about, folks?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Fair warning: Rant
Public companies are now being run by the shareholders that take out payday loans, refinance their houses so much they owe money when they sell, cannot build traditional savings since all their income is treated as disposable. Basically the get rich generation with no long term goals other than their next big "fix".
Why does it surprise anybody that the driving force behind these companies is to sell out no matter what the cost to the business, the employees, or even the customers?
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
It's about taking your January share price of $19 and doubling it into $40 over the course of a few short months, not to mention your shareholders, and perhaps most importantly vested employees. Sure, Jerry has a lot of cash with or without Microsoft but employees with shares could literally double their investments overnight with this deal. I'm sure theres a good bit of internal angst.
People used to speak of Microsoft Millionaires, this could have made a few Yahoo Millionaires. Chances are Ichann will get a shot to do what Jerry should have done.
Well, since you asked why:
Maybe not too far off the mark...
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
.... He made a long-term decision instead of thinking about short-term profits. He's being sued for looking beyond the next few quarters.
If you think Yahoo can't turn it around, then yeah. He fucked up big-time. But if you think (as I'm sure he does) that Yahoo can be an innovative company that can step in to fill the gap as Microsoft declines, then he did the right thing. Hardly matters either way though. (Some profit now > Lots of profit over time) in the eyes of wall street.
Microsoft who acted out of a personal interest to keep Yahoo independent. Something wrong with that? Oh, yeah... public company.
There's nothing wrong with acting in personal interests if there's a reasonable argument that it coincides with shareholder interests. And in this case, there certainly is.
Look at Google's value. Which companies are in any position at all to grab any significant share of what they're doing in the market? It's a short list. Yahoo's on it.
If you were holding onto a significant chunk of one of those companies, would you want to (a) sell it now for a quick but small profit or (b) figure out what changes you need to make in the company to have it better compete with Google and acquire value on that level?
Some shareholders might choose a. But b is certainly reasonable.
Frankly, so is the Microsoft antipathy. People like to talk as if the haters are just irrational folks who got up on the anti-MS side of the bed. Nevermind that there's a significant real technical and business history that would make any sane and competent person wary of them.
The web as a platform is open and expanding. Windows as a platform is stagnating and closed. Which do you want to be invested in for the next 10 years?
Tweet, tweet.
Why on earth would you hold out for $31?
Well, as but one example, Carl Ichan is reported to own about 50 million shares in Yahoo ( http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080513/yahoo_icahn.html ) so a stock increase from $30 to $31 represents a profit of about $50 million. Now, call me wacky, but that sounds like a good reason to me...
Yahoo would not have survived to 2009 if all it's employees quit. That's why Yang made sure $2 billion of the purchase price would go to employee severance plans. There's probably been some disruption anyway. Wouldn't you have a resume on the street with all of the FUD and BS being flung? The severance plans gave employees a reason to stick around and be fired by M$, or just keep on working if the deal fell through.
Painting this to be a personal thing by Yang is nuts. Yahoo and M$ were getting along famously until M$ decided to launch a hostile takeover.
/sigh I have no problem with your mention of Google, but Apple... Really? Like for realsies? Sorry bro, I'm into computers... Not toys.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Apple is innovating?
They take technology that exists in lots of other places, and put it in a prettier package. OSX is nice, but it's BSD with pretty graphics.
The iPhone is nice, but it's a cleaned up version of the Nokia E70 (see: http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone)
Apple is known NOT to listen to their customers. They listen to Steve Jobs (and for their benefit, I might add).
Honestly, Microsoft has been around the block on these types of things before, and while Google and Apple are big threats, I don't consider Microsoft a 'stupid' company by any means -- I feel they will have a period of crap (oh wait, Vista...), reorganize and come back stronger.
And in the end it's better for us all if they do. Although if MS ever put out an OS that is better than Linux on security, and better than OSX on ease of use and prettiness -- Slashdotters would still decry it. So I guess on this site, it's lose lose for them. But their bank accounts are still rather full.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
I hope everyone realises that Carl Icahn isn't a long-term shareholder upset with how the company is being run. He thought he could run it better when Jerry Yang rebuffed MS, and AS A RESULT, bought a significant number of shares. In other words, he bought into the company for the sole purpose of getting Yang tossed out.
In the world of billionaires, not always the most friendly of folks, Icahn is about as pleasant as a rabid shark with PMS. If he gets his way, he'll install a new board, sell Yahoo to MS at $40, help gut the company, and then leave with a few more dollars in his pockets. Yahoo staff will be out of work, the search engine market will become a battle of two titans, and basically everyone will lose except for Carl and his board.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Oh yeah I feel real sorry for the guy who didn't cash out for $1,500,000,000 because he could have made $1,550,000,000
Which may be exactly why MS is so interested in acquiring Yahoo. They do a lot of the same things. And so does Google. So, instead of MS vs. Yahoo vs. Google, it would be MS Yahoo vs. Google.
Sometimes the point isn't to expand into new markets, but to gain control of the ones you're already in.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
If it came as a surprise to anyone that Yahoo's founders and high-level managers have an antipathy towards MSFT then they must've been living in a cave, or are total morons. From Yahoo's inception there has been little love for MSFT--if they ever cooperated it was grudgingly, in their own self interest. There is a cultural gap bigger than the Grand Canyon there.
It doesn't help that there is a giant impedance mismatch when it comes to technology and infrastructure. A Netcraft search is telling: Yahoo is almost universally FreeBSD, and what is left is Linux. Yahoo has ZERO Microsoft in their data centres. MSFT, of course, is almost universally Windows Server.
Remember what happened to Hotmail when MSFT bought it? They ripped out all the FreeBSD over the first couple of years, subjecting users to regular periodic disruptions. "To hell with users, we eat our own dogfood dammit!". Not only that, I'd say most of the hotmail employees were abandoned too--wandered away or pushed out.
Hotmail still exists today as a cornerstone to MSFT's "Live" initiative and is probably the biggest webmail provider out there so it wasn't all bad of course, but there is a difference here: MSFT had no webmail service of note before buying Hotmail. In the case of Yahoo, what have they got that MSFT doesn't have? They both have an IM platform and client, a search portal, webmail, advertising services, etc...except NONE of Yahoo's runs on MSFT technology! Within 2 years, the yahoo portal will be gone, the IM client will be gone, the webmail will be gone, everything will be gone. Yahoo is coveted for its customer base and advertising presence. It'll live for awhile as "MS Yahoo! Live" for awhile then it'll be gone. It's employees will be gone. It'll be a footnote in history.
It doesn't matter all that much to me; I have no great love for either company and think they both offer mediocre service and crappy software. However, if Yahoo's directors and Yang himself care about the company and really believe it would grow, they've made the right decision to resist a buyout by MSFT. You'd have to be a fool to think there'd be anything of substance left of Yahoo after MSFT slayed them and feasted upon the corpse. Some of us would cheer to see that, but I'm betting the founder, directors and loyal employees would understandably NOT want to see that.
Anyways, who is to say that Yahoo shareholders would be better off with the MSFT shares tossed their way in a buyout? Right now, I'd say NEITHER stock is going anywhere exiting in the next 2 years. By the way, if you just go by the charts, Yahoo did the right thing; in the past year, YHOO has lost just over 9 percent, but MSFT has lost over 10 percent. If you extend where things have been out to 2010, if you think YHOO is heading towards $11, then MSFT will probably be $10.50.
No, it's not insightful at all. If you think it is I hope to hell you don't get mod points ever again.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Of course they are, and they continue to innovate. The iPhone interface isn't an innovation? And are you fucking kidding me about the so-called "Best Page In The Universe"? Anyone who could have such a shitty-looking website doesn't have the least goddamned clue about design, or its importance, especially when it comes to human interface. Microsoft and Dell have also introduced dramatic innovations, and I'm fully aware that that statement is heresy on Slashdot, but give credit where it is due (and I'm saying this as a Mac user). The problem is that the word doesn't mean what most people think it means (apologies to Inigo Montoya). From Dictionary.com:
innovate : to introduce something new; make changes in anything established.
People usually mistakenly conflate "innovate" with "invent", and to say that any of these three companies has not innovated would be wrong. Apple's innovations were to bring geeky technology to the masses in a way that made sense and were useful (GUI, CD-ROM drive, USB, Unix); Microsoft of course were the ones who spread computing far, wide, and deep; Dell's innovations were in manufacturing and sales, and they can be fairly credited with commoditizing the personal computer. In my opinion Michael Dell has done more to drive down the cost of computers, thereby bringing heretofore artificially expensive gadgets into the mainstream, than anyone else. Like him or loathe him, his place in computing history is secure.
A HAHAHAHAHAHA. You honestly believe that after some pending MS collapse that 3 different linux distributions will have the OS top market share? And you got modded Informative...
The level of self affirmation on this site has hit a new level.
Ok, so how else is MS going to get money when businesses are not buying Office 2007 because it is too different, not buying Vista because of reliability issues, and even the ordinary person sees Vista as a slow, unfamiliar piece of crap? What else is going to fill this void? Not Apple for sure after all the "think different" campaigns, the Apple brand has to be higher then the ordinary brand, and MS seems to have killed off all commercial OSes, so where else are people going to get OSes for computers? Linux is free, can look just like Windows/Mac/Atari/Amiga/etc. and is supported by many major businesses. you can't avoid the fact that Vista is a disaster, and Office 2007 is unfamiliar, MS has to innovate or die and it has shown it is not capable of innovating
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Office 2007 is actually very successful. Don't allow yourself to be manipulated by the Slashdot anti-Microsoft sentiments.
I also found the assertion of the GP hilarious. Do you interpret this graph as showing Microsoft's impending doom? If you do, you need glasses.
People seem to forget what a disaster HP/Compaq was, and what a money sink-hole AOL/TW was.
Yahoo has been known to do most of their web development on open platforms and languages. Microsoft's web services often come in third place. By purchasing Yahoo, you either allow Yahoo to remain Yahoo and abandon existing Microsoft services (never going to happen), or you force Yahoo's users into Microsoft services they didn't want (wasting what you just spent billions on), or you basically keep the two companies as seperate companies.
These two companies were not meant to be merged.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I use Linux at home and I got to agree that he's living in a fantasy land. Linux has less than 1% of the desktop market last I saw. When at least 10% of the desktops sold have Linux on them, Ill start to believe in Microsoft's death. Hell, their nearest competition is Apple at some 7%
And at one time, Netscape had a monopoly on web browsers. Sure, it took all sorts of illegal actions on Microsoft's part to obliterate that monopoly, but 8-9 years ago, if you had said that another browser would start to seriously displace Internet Explorer, you'd be laughed out of the room.
Now Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape are gaining ground monthly - while still battling the "same old" (actions) from Microsoft. At the current rate, Internet Explorer will soon no longer be the browser holding majority marketshare.
What makes you think that Apple (gaining market share almost monthly) or Linux (slowly gaining market share for most of the months over the past 2 years) will not eventually reach the same point?
Here's the beauty of it that most people dont think of. For the most part (for the average user) a web browser is a web browser - if it works (and they all do - to at least the extent that the average user needs), then it doesnt matter too much which they use, so why not use the one that their tech/computer saavy friend/some site advertised to them? And in doing so, nothing has to be changed and nothing else needs to be written for it.
Now, when it comes to computers, Apple is beating the odds in that there are more things available for Windows... but for how much longer? The more market share Apple or Linux or whatever gets, the more stuff that will be written for it. That means less reasons not to switch (added to all of the many reasons cited on /. every day on why people should).
See the difference? Browser share gains are a relatively flat "curve" because of that... but soon, the OS curve will change from somewhat flat gain by non-Windows, to an actual curve (higher number of people switching each month) for whatever OS starts to truly compete with Windows, simply because as the percentage of users grows, the software to run on the OS will increase, fueling an even larger percentage per month to switch.
Other things that will help increase that uptake are things like the growing interest in OpenOffice and the growing defection from IE to Firefox or Safari.
Dont say it wont happen... it already is.
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