Battered Yahoo Admits It Overplayed Hand; Open To New Microsoft Talks
alleyinsider.com
alleyinsider.com
Yahoo is a legend and runs a couple of interesting websites and keeps doing new stuff here and there. I like that. I want that to continue. I dont want them to be swallowd by a company that I dont like.
And about the money... its only money. Do we all HAVE TO bow down to the dollar and each and every day go the path of the most money? No. I dont. Im free. And everyone who says Jerry HAS TO because he is the CEO of a public traded company has simply been proven wrong. How cool is that? I dont want a predictable world where everything is based on pennies. Lets celebrate some rebellion ;-)
As for money, while your heavenly spirit may not bow down to it, shareholders definitely do. And obviously even you need money at times, or are all those tax-free offerings for nothing?
> I dont want a predictable world...
Aren't you omniscient? Surely you find it difficult to be surprised. You mind telling us all how this merger will play out?
Reality is setting in. Which makes me think maybe it's time to go long. What do you all think?
Edited to add: on further review, groveling is certainly overstating the case. But if Yahoo is willing to reach out and make it look like this can be a real partnership both sides are actually interested in, it will be a lot more doable.
The whole thing where they've been trying to make Microsoft look bad and act like they want nothing to do for the deal hasn't benefited anyone.
It really wasn't either. Hostile takeovers happen rarely in tech because it's really easy to create effective poison pills. I only shorted because Yahoo seemed so obstinate. They've had a bucket of cold water tossed on their heads now and are gasping for breath.
Or you could wait for Yahoo! to do the stock buyback...Hehe.
When it's done, I'm sure there will be some 'negotiation hack' lessons. In the meantime, this is noise -- leaks, rumors, transient stock ticks. More appropriate for 'Daytrader News' than 'Hacker News'.
Sometimes, the biggest noise is the complaining about what is noise.
Since there are no downvotes, we don't know if >>34 people are tired of such headline-news-ticker-like microstories. But the real question shouldn't be raw vote totals, but what people want this site to be.
TechCrunch floods the zone with morning, afternoon, night updates on MSFT-YHOO, as do many other sites. And yet any one tactic or reversal in the middle of this multi-month negotiation isn't likely to have any lessons for hackers/startuppers/those-selling-their-companies-to-GYM-etc.
My comments are made in the hope that next time, some of those 34 upvotes decide to pass, so the next frivolous "Yang writes letter" or "Balmer drops new hint in internal email" story doesn't shoot to #1 in an hour or two.
Say, Yahoo agrees to sell itself to MS. Then where would MS send the money to, and how would the shareholders get that money?
If that were your retirement fund or your stock options in your employer, wouldn't you want that money? And if you were a professional investor, wouldn't you be downright berzerk at all that money being thrown away?
Computer geeks like to go around badmouthing Microsoft all the time, but taking that attitude as a CEO or board member of a public company makes you unprofessional and irresponsible. To shareholders, Microsoft's money spends just like everyone else's.
Yahoo has underperformed for years. Sure, it has long-term potential. But investors have little reason to think the current management will realize this potential any better than the last couple of regimes. Meanwhile, as much as geeks love to hate Microsoft, they have decades of experience in producing enormous profits, and there's no particular reason to think that buying Yahoo will change that.
This isn't just short term vs. long term. This is realizing a return on investment vs. watching that return slip through your fingers. And investors are pissed.
These guys were gambling for a few bucks per share, just as much as Jerry Yang and the Yahoo board.
Point is, this stuff is largely crocodile tears. These guys weren't long because they thought Yahoo would be bought out, they were long because they saw value in the investment. Complaining now that Yahoo's negotiation strategy was somehow "irresponsible", is either massive hindsight bias, or part of some more complicated scheme....
Microsoft is offering more per share than the current share price, benefiting shareholders.
A MicroHoo has better long term prospects of competing with Google, creating additional long term value for the shareholders.
To compete with Google they need brilliant engineers and ideas. Merging isn't going to magically produce those. About the only advantage Microsoft offers Yahoo in this is access to their desktop and a huge pile of cash that allows Yahoo to chase crazy strategies with slim chances of huge payoff, assuming Yahoo has some ideas like that. Yahoo offers Microsoft eyeballs.
My point was that simply merging isn't going to magically create ideas and execution (good engineers). All it creates is a distraction, while the two sets of management elbow for position and a ton of employees flee.
So maybe MicroHoo doesn't need brilliant ideas and engineers, but it needs some of each, and merging isn't going to create any of either, and will most likely scare away quite a few of the great engineers that both companies already have.
I think brilliant (well, clever is usually the word I would use, brilliance is much more rare) ideas are what make 4 guys in a garage able to take on a market leader, but when you've got a merger of companies with a combined market capitalization of over $300 billion, blunt force often does the trick. This is sumo wrestling, not fencing. :-)
And in the world of blunt force, the combined forces of the most profitable company in the technology market and the most popular site on the internet could pack a pretty hefty punch. I don't think that's a particularly good strategy for MS to pursue, but I wouldn't misunderestimate them.
Very good point.
I still think big companies can fence. Granted, Amazon's market cap is only like 1/10th of that ($32 billion), but it's AWS products are fairly innovative and leading their space at the moment. So big companies can innovate, they just seem slow and totally random about it.
I guess I'm just not seeing what there is to 'blunt force' in the market. You can't force people to buy your ad space. I guess if they could demonstrate clearly more eyeballs and higher CTR than adwords, advertisers would flock... is that what you envision?
MS has a bigger warchest than Google and with the combined MS / Yahoo they'd have more eyes too. They could run that segment of their market at a loss for a while to try to steal some of Adwords' thunder. Think of MS's entrance into the game console or MP3 player markets. While, again, I don't think it's a great strategy to plow into entrenched markets like that, compared to creating new markets (a la your Amazon example), MS has certainly demonstrated a willingness to do so. In fact, I'd say that's almost they corporate modus operandi; almost their complete history has been bulldozing their way into markets using sheer brawn.
However, when Yahoo! stock gets bought by MS, it becomes MS stock. MS stock is worth more (I presume,) so the stock rises in value. Even if MS liquidates everything Yahoo! had, the stock remains MS stock. Stock is a share of the company. It isn't tied to any particular assets.