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.
Yahoo’s annual shareholder meeting is just a few hours old, and already Microsoft is having its say about Chairman Roy Bostock’s portrayal of its buyout bid melodrama. In comments to Yahoo shareholders, Bostock said the board never “resisted” Microsoft’s offer and claimed once again that the software giant was never actually fully engaged in negotiations.
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.
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.
Having so persuasively argued that Carl Icahn is a doddering Luddite with no articulated plan for Yahoo other than the company’s sale to Microsoft, Yahoo has taken the logical next step and appointed the activist shareholder to its board of directors.
Oh, happy day! Another letter from Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock and CEO Jerry Yang! Yawn … With its Aug. 1 shareholder meeting fast approaching, the company’s leadership is doing all it can to rally support. Hence today’s paean to redundancy, which argues once again, and in mind-numbing detail, why the company believes stockholders should beware the “Icahn-Microsoft agenda.”
There’s a great scene in “The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!” in which Lt. Frank Drebin, the film’s bumbling protagonist, stands before an exploding fireworks factory, proclaiming, “Nothing to see here! Please disperse! Nothing to see here!” to the assembled onlookers. That scene springs to mind today in light of Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang’s latest “try not to get too distracted by this Microsoft business” message to his employees.
Much as Yahoo would like to believe otherwise, Microsoft’s not done with the company yet. It’s circled back for another run at Yahoo and, if it’s successful, it will seize Yahoo’s search business and sell the rest of the company off for parts.
Carl Icahn has finally broken his silence. The outspoken billionaire investor who’s been oddly quiet since Yahoo announced its advertising partnership with Google, finally commented on the deal this morning saying it “might have some merit.”
Our long national nightmare of unceasing Yahoo-Microsoft headlines is finally over. Shares of Yahoo slipped into the mud this afternoon amid reports it has concluded whatever tortured discussions it’s been having with Microsoft without reaching any sort of merger agreement. Redmond, it seems, is no longer willing to pay $33 per share to acquire Yahoo. It is, however, open to discussing an “alternative transaction.” Meanwhile, Yahoo and Google are moving closer to a deal.
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 …”
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