We knew it had to happen. There was no way the great white (and blue, and whatever color Yahoo is) search engine sharks could resist the fire hoses full of text chum Twitter produces 24/7. Heck, Twitter even chops its textual fish heads into lovely bite-sized chunks.
Once again for old time’s sake, the Yahoo-Microsoft soap opera in Digital Daily intros, with apologies to Steven Spielberg, Mel Blanc, Queen, Neil Diamond, Barbra Streisand, Tallulah Bankhead, Marlene Dietrich and the entire cast of “The Sound of Music.”
Looks like Carl Icahn did show up to his first Yahoo board meeting, though it appears he wasn’t able to get much done. The new board, which also includes former Viacom CEO Frank Biondi and former CEO of Nextel Partners, John Chapple, reportedly met Tuesday and decided as a first course of business to talk to Time Warner about the future of its AOL division.
Yahoo … eventually … in my opinion … they have to do something with Microsoft eventually. They have to do it or Google is going to kill them.”
– Carl Icahn promises Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang an enjoyable board meeting this week.
$36 million. That’s what Yahoo spent in the first half of 2008 for outside counsel on Microsoft’s unsolicited takeover offer and the debacle that followed. “We incurred incremental costs of $36 million primarily for outside advisers related to Microsoft’s proposals to acquire all or a part of the Company, other strategic alternatives, the recently resolved proxy contest, and related litigation defense costs,” Yahoo disclosed in a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
What a horribly anticlimactic anticlimax. Billionaire backseat driver Carl Icahn has decided not to attend the Yahoo shareholders meeting Friday. This after months of agitating for the company’s sale to Microsoft and ouster of its board of directors. “I will not be attending [the annual Yahoo meeting],” Icahn wrote in a post to The Icahn Report.
Just four days to go before Yahoo’s annual shareholders’ meeting, and already things are starting to get messy. Capital Research Global Investors, Yahoo’s second-largest shareholder, is considering withholding votes for Chairman Roy Bostock and CEO Jerry Yang in protest over the company’s bungling of Microsoft’s takeover bid.
After months of agonizing introspection, it appears Yahoo President Sue Decker has finally gotten in touch with her true feelings about Carl Icahn. In an interview with CNBC Wednesday, Decker welcomed the billionaire backseat-driver to Yahoo’s board of directors with a big wet PR kiss.
Differences of opinion make the financial markets go round. And it would appear that we have some strong ones among the proxy services advising Yahoo shareholders on how to vote at the upcoming election of Yahoo’s board members.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
Don't miss a post! Sign up for our Daily Email and get AllThingsD.com delivered each day.
Get columns, blogs and video from D and All Things Digital on your iPhone. Download now »
