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Yahoo Interested In a Microsoft Buyout, But Microsoft Isn't
Linux Blog writes "The Google-Yahoo advertising deal has been rejected by the Department of Justice, and Google has pulled the plug on a search-ad partnership with Yahoo that would have given Yahoo major new revenue, but that raised antitrust concerns. Now, Yahoo has said the 'For Sale' sign is still on its front lawn and that Microsoft should buy the company. The internet portal's co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang made this comment despite the fact Yahoo rejected a $33 a share offer from Microsoft back in May. What a huge loss for the share holders. Microsoft was quick to respond that their buyout efforts were a thing of the past, but left the door open to a search partnership."
If we relate buyouts to marriage, partnerships to casual sex and the Department of Justice to the organisation that's meant to protect teen celebrities from big bad grown up pedophile celebrities... you get the picture.
... until they can get the pieces of Yahoo that they want for a good price. There is certainly no rush in this climate.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
The sea of FUD receded and Yahoo was left naked, rather than clothed.
In other words, their true value became clear, and they are indeed worth less than they claimed.
Where's your middle finger now Yang? Do you see the pitchforks and torches of shareholders on the horizon? Hope it was worth it.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
MS was willing to pay $33 a share to keep Yahoo from aligning with Google, now that it's become patently obvious that the DoJ isn't going to allow that to happen the strategic value of Yahoo to MS has gone down significantly.
It was worth it to MS to pay $33 per share in order to still have a chance at that market. Right now, with that out of consideration the value to MS has dropped significantly.
Are they still around?
I think Yahoo is a dead brand to you. You'd be amazed by the number of people who have Yahoo as their homepage and use several of Yahoo's built in services such as gaming, weather, etc. You have a list of sites to get all the services you need, and if you find a site that does one or another service better, you are perfectly happy changing it (I'm guessing). But there are a lot of people, as someone else mentioned, that came from the AOL world and like having one portal with the the "interweb" stuff in one portal. They go to one place and get their news, weather, horoscope for the day, and they like that.
When MS tried to buy Yahoo (who was already struggling then), I bet you were probably one of those who yelled BORG! and railed against the proposed offer. Replace "rejected Google, based on anti-trust" with "rejected Microsoft, based on anti-trust" and I bet you would be writing your congressman to congratulate the DOJ!
Geeks are like Mules. They are a cross-bred animal and almost always sterile.
d00d, he spelled fail with "ph" - that makes it teh Internetz speak!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Great system - government doesn't allow market to work - and then takes money to make it work (for sufficiently poor values of "work").
This is the 'modern' Republican way.
Privatize profits and socialize losses. (Corporations only of course.)
Conservatives need to take this last election and use it as fuel to go read any of John Dean's recent books on the failure of the Republican party by betraying true conservatives.
(Even Goldwater before he died screamed for the Republicans to stop going down the road that led to Bush II and the move to corporate authoritarian policies.)
as opposed to the Democratic way, where Pelosi is calling for bailing out totally-blue unionized-companies such as GM? The Republicans' mistake in bailouts (besides the bailout ever being considered acceptable in free society in the first place), was in not targeting the bailout to those corporations that would then reward the Republican party. The Democrats are quite keen to not make that same mistake. Lots of taxpayer (of all political persuasions) will now be made available to those industries and companies that hand significant money back to the Democrats in the form of political donations.
...
Who was it that said a capitalist (or Republican) will sell you the rope to hang himself?
Huh????
The offer was for each share of Yahoo you could get up half in cash and the remainder in Microsoft stock (not 1 to 1 mind you). Since the offer was dropped, MSFT went to around 22, and YHOO went to 14. MSFT at the time was trading around 28 to 30, and YHOO well, that was 33. You would have been better off with any deal...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Layoff the rest of the people you don't need. Cut unprofitable services. Improve the quality of those services that are profitable. Maintain your R&D division. Come up with some new products.
In other words, turn yourself into a profitable, but smaller company going forward. Why, you might even consider the possibility of being around 20 years from now as an independant entity.
I mean, at this stage, why continue thinking "exit strategy" like a 2-year old startup?
I know, I know. It's an odd idea in hi tech. It seems to work pretty well for the grocer, the tailor, the baker and various other businesses though.
Oh, and especially, please, pretty please? Get rid of the obtrusive 3rd party ads. I block all that crap. If you just put a tasteful, static GIF on your pages, I wouldn't block your ads. Nevermind that though; I've paid for Yahoo services before. Their music service was good before they stopped maintaining it properly. I've never paid Google for anything. So. Yahoo, why don't you start serving customers like you once did? Why don't you place unobtrusive ads like Google does?
Whatever you do, please don't change your old-school Finance pages--your GNUPlot based charts would be irreplaceable. Don't get bought. Please.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
No doubt, for all the things I dislike about Ballmer, I'll call a spade a spade; he played this one well. Now he can come back in a month or two when the stock bottoms out and offer $10/share, and with the ball in his court he can probably make other stipulations on the deal. I'm thinking he got this play straight out of Billg's play book - Bill's been known to be an awesome poker player from what I've heard.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Not as bad as you made it look. The MS offer involved MS stock, and if people had taken it, they would now have about $20. Still not the best decision Yahoo ever made.
Microsoft's stock is sure to go back up after the recovery comes. Does anyone honestly think Yahoo's is going to rise all that much?
No, grandparent poster was right. Epic fail. It's one thing to hold out for a better deal when several companies want to buy yours. It's another when no one else really does.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
YHOO was trading for around $30 on the open market at the time of that offer. If shareholders wanted to sell out, they could've just sold their shares through any broker on the exchange, and gotten $30. Instead they wanted to hang on and get the extra few bucks of merger arbitrage; and they lost their bet, since the merger didn't go through.
I don't really get blaming Yahoo's board here--- anyone who wanted to sell out at that price could have, without needing Yahoo's management's permission to do so.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'd hate to see microsoft buy yahoo just for that reason.
You'll find out at the end of Act III, that's what the play was really about.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)