Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Analysts to Yahoo CEO: Where Are Those “Boatloads of Money” You Were Talking About?
Wall Street is finally having its say about the newly announced Microsoft-Yahoo deal, and while opinions are mixed, there is some consensus on who got the better end of the deal: Microsoft. Seems the Street would have much preferred the “boatloads of money” Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz once said she’d demand for a search deal than the “boatloads of value” she claims to have given them this morning. After the jump, a roundup of analysts’ notes issued about the deal.
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz says the company’s newly inked search advertising pact “comes with boatloads of value for Yahoo,” but you wouldn’t know it to look at the company’s share price. Yahoo’s shares slipped into the mud on the deal’s announcement, declining nearly seven percent to $16.07 in early trading.
The markets are having their say about Yahoo’s choice of Autodesk Chairwoman Carol Bartz as CEO and they don’t seem to much care for it. Though Bartz is a widely-respected Silicon Valley veteran and has done much to improve Autodesk’s fortunes, investors aren’t so sure she’ll do the same for Yahoo.
For Palm, which lost two-thirds of its market value in 2008, today may well be a watershed event–the point at which its long downward trajectory was suddenly reversed, buoyed up by a new operating system too long in coming. At a Consumer Electronics Show event later this morning, the company is expected to uncrate its Nova OS and a line of Nova-powered offerings with which it hopes to reinvigorate the Palm franchise. Hope, of course, is the operative word here.
