DateDoc

Yahoo's board rejected M$ bid for yahoo over a week ago. Yang says Y! is worth more than M$ offered. Gates says the offer is fair and now they will try to takeover Y! in a proxy battle.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23237868/

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WiredGuy

They really seem to want it badly.
WG

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DateDoc

Without Yahoo they will always be #2. They are too far behind Google to catch up by themselves. Even with Yahoo they still may not catch Google but it is their only logical chance to do it as quickly as possible.

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aico

Microcrap needs to stick to the software business, everything else they try to do fails, they'll just fuck this up too.

qxm

it looks like its gonna happen.........money talks....

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pornask

anything but google

GatorB

They offered money, yahoo says no. I've never gotten this idea that I can start a company and some other guy can just come in and take it over. WTF? That should be illegal. That basically thievery. That would be like me offering you $10 for your car, you tell me no, and I can still take it if I want to.

Diligent

GatorB, I'm guessing the possibility for it is due to the 51%-of-shares rule.
Then it's simply a matter of the majority of shareholders voting for a sale...

So does anyone know what percentage of shares "external shareholders" hold..?
(I'm not that *diligent* in looking that up right now, lol)

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dav3

Let's wage a proxy battle for the MS HQ!!!

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DateDoc

there are about 1.34 billion shares - not sure as to how much Yahoo has control over. http://moneycentral.msn.com/ownership?Symbol=YHOO

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gideongallery

you realize the insiders only own like 10% of the company

the key is that they sold 90% to other people

microsoft "hostile" takeover is basically saying let the 90% decide if they want to take the microsoft deal.

instead of going all for one, microsoft will be approaching all those institutional investors to buy up the stock at the higher price.


if more than 54% of those institutional investors like the $35 deal then microsoft will have a majority in favor even though the yahoo insider (10%) said no.

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Diligent

Alright.. that's pretty fucking many, lol

So I'm guessing MS can go ahead with that

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Snake Doctor

If you got 100 of your friends together to buy a car, and you each put in money towards the purchase and therefore owned a "share" of the car, then your friends can sell their shares whenever they want and if someone ends up with 51% of the shares, they control the car.....even if it was originally your idea to buy the car.

If you want to own a company that nobody can take away from you, then don't sell more than 49% of it.

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Barefootsies

Capitalism at it's finest.

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Enough Said.

"Would you rather live like a king for a year or like a prince forever?"

V_RocKs

I think the shareholders will hold out for other bids... Only because it is Microsoft and the last thing they want is to be Microsoft shareholders.

D

I say: go Microsoft.

Now might be the time to consider selling those Yahoo stocks, if you got them... I'd think Microsoft's gonna make an attractive offer if they're out for blood.

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-D.
ICQ: 202-96-31

JuiceMonkey

I don't see why google isn't making an offer? If they could get Yahoo it would be lights out for MS.

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Semi-Retired-Dave

Yup, their live.com didn't do very well. Google is dominating. Who still uses Yahoo?

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slapass

Remember he already sold the company, and now he is screwing the shareholders by not letting them cash out at a high price. Thievery yes but on the other end.

aico

I also believe they are the creators of HD-DVD, I could be wrong though. I don't understand why they just don't focus on what they do best, buying up small software companies and putting it on the market.

Snake Doctor

Idiocy at it's finest

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spacedog

Apparently alot more than you think.

for every 1 google visit I get, yahoo sends me 20, for same keyword.

Scootermuze

Any large company is foolish to let go of their controlling interest for this very reason..

Dvae

Exactly, its apparent that some don't understand basic economics.

slavdogg

Monkey Boy's three-legged race


The Borg-Yahoo merger won't work. Here's why. It's like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they'll run faster.

Here's the weird thing: I first heard that line about the 100-yard dash from Ballmer himself, maybe a decade ago.

See, the biggest mistake people make about Monkey Boy is thinking he's dumb. Trust me, he's not dumb. I've known him for years and he's really, really smart. Like scary smart, freako IQ, way high on standardized tests all his life. He remembers everyone he's ever met. He remembers every detail of every meeting and loves to freak out little junior Borgsters by recalling everything that happened at some random one-off from months or even years before. Total photographic memory.

The problem is not that he lacks IQ. Sure he's Rain Man when it comes to remembering things. The problem is he has no vision, and no imagination. He's all left brain. Hence this Yahoo offer. All he can see is that Google keeps beating the snot out of Microsoft and after all these years his coders still can't create a search engine that works as well as Google's and no matter what Microsoft does they can't catch up. He's tired of banging his head against the wall, so finally he just says, To hell with it, let's buy someone and see what happens. His board is just as tired and bereft of ideas so they say, Sure, whatever, go for it.

But here's the really dark part of all this. He knows it won't work. He has to know this. He's not stupid. The cultures will never fit together. And the deal is too big. It's not manageable. And it's completely anathema to Microsoft. It's totally out of character for them. It goes against everything the company has ever stood for. Ballmer knows this, and he's doing it anyway. Because this is exactly what every old-guard CEO does when all else fails. I mean it's right there in the official playbook that you get in business school. And ultimately, smart as he is, Ballmer is an old-school kind of guy. He's not really a tech guy. He has a mindset that was formed in Detroit, where he grew up. He's a Big Three automaker kind of guy. And this is a Big Three move. It's Ford buying Jaguar and Land Rover and Volvo because they can't think of anything else to do.

So if the deal happens -- and I'm not convinced it will -- Ballmer will have bought himself maybe two years before it becomes clear to the entire world that it has failed. By then maybe Ballmer will be gone and someone else will have to mop up the mess. Or maybe Ballmer will still be around, in which case maybe he'll do another deal and buy himself two more years or whatever. He'll figure that out when he gets there. All he knows is that right now he's got to do something. His stock has been underperforming the market for years. His shareholders are pissed. His board is grumbling.

But what, exactly, is the big vision here? I guess they'll talk about how phase one was the PC revolution and now we're entering phase two which is Internet computing and the cloud and they'll say that by joining together they'll become this giant powerful megacloud provider and the battle for utility computing is going to be all about scale. Oh, and synergy. Yeah. They'll talk a lot about synergy. You know, like when you hook together a bunch of data centers that run on completely different technology stacks.

Scariest to me is that in all the articles I've seen the one thing Ballmer keeps bringing up is how he'll be able to save $1 billion a year in costs. Are you kidding me? Is this Microsoft or Dunder Mifflin? I mean, I don't doubt he could save a billion a year. But it says a lot about the kind of company Microsoft has become that this is what they're thinking about.

According to our spies in Redmond the general consensus among the Borg rank-and-file is sheer and total dread. At best they see this as a giant pain in the ass, an enormous drain on resources, an unnecessary and pointless distraction with lots of nights and weekends spent slogging away on random useless bullshit and dealing will all sorts of annoying non-Microsoft people who don't understand how Microsoft does things but can't be blown off or pushed around like the "partners" the Borg is accustomed to dealing with.

Imagine a circus act in which two enormous, clumsy, awkward elephants that don't really like each other are supposed to mate while riding on skateboards. Now imagine that it is your job, you lucky bastard, to be one of the little circus clowns standing alongside trying to make this extremely unnatural and unholy act take place. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people will have their lives completely ruined and flipped upside down for the next two years because of this deal. They'll see even less of their kids. And those ski weekends? Forget about it. Ain't gonna happen. Meanwhile Google will keep pulling away.

That's the good scenario. In the worst-case scenario the merger turns into a never-ending world of shit à la AOL and Time-Warner, and Microsoft ends up gutted and gasping and then they waste another few years debating whether they should break the two companies apart and if so how do they do that and then maybe some prick like Carl Icahn or Kirk Kerkorian jumps in and adds to the misery.

Yeah. It's that good. That giant buzzing sound you hear is the whirring of photocopiers in Redmond revving up and spitting out resumes. If this deal goes through people will be crawling over each other to get out of that place. You wonder why old-timers like Jeff Raikes and Charles Fitzgerald are bailing? Now we know. These guys are good soldiers who stuck it out through the DOJ nightmare and fought the good fight. But they're done. They're not hanging around for this mess.

Which brings me back to the three-legged racers in the 100-yard dash. Back when Microsoft was riding high I was talking to Ballmer at some conference -- I have no idea where or when, but I'm sure he remembers exactly which conference this was and what day of the week it was and the number of the hotel room he stayed in -- and on that day somebody had just announced some huge anti-Borg merger, and all the idiots in the press were saying this was going to kill Microsoft, and Ballmer was just laughing. Laughing. Laughing his ass off.

Ballmer said he loved when his rivals merged, because whenever the also-rans in any market start teaming up they might as well be waving a white flag. Because it's over. You've beaten them. You've driven them to despair. They haven't been able to beat you on their own; there's no way they'll do it together. Then he told me that line about the hundred-yard dash.

I'll never forget it. But I guess he has.

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D

Cute... but unless you're the blogger known as 'FakeSteve,' you might wanna credit your source and use quotes.

http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2008/0...-of-ideas.html

Plagiarism sucks.

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-D.
ICQ: 202-96-31

Rochard

M$ loves to dominate.... They don't play to win, they play to destroy anyone in their path.

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gideongallery

this post missed the point completely

microsoft is very good at making an api available for developers
the dominate the market not because their product is the best but because it is developed for by a large number of independent developers

Google is one of the first companies that does this as well as microsoft (by supporting open source) and they have a pretty good product too

on a technological basis yahoo has a lot of good technology, but DOES NOT work well with developers so the first thing you are going to see after this merger is the pushing out of developer api for all of yahoo's technology.

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aico

and yet they fail miserably at it.