Monday, July 14, 2008

Poor Jerry Yang, shame on Icahn & Microsoft

Big bullies sure don’t know if no means no, and they’ll never take no for an answer…

Wait, scratch that one above. It’s not like Yahoo Inc. entirely rejected Microsoft’s offer, it’s just that Yahoo is not agreeing yet with the money offered.

In rejecting the hostile takeover, Yahoo said it repeated its own offer to sell the entire company to Microsoft for at least $33 per share, and also offered to negotiate an improved transaction involving only Yahoo's search business. But Microsoft rejected both offers, Yahoo said with such a sad expression (figure of speech speaking ;-p).

To cut short and to avoid you snoring away from the boring news that you’ve read dozens of times on the net, I’ll go straight to the point of story behind that intriguing photo shots above. Carl Icahn, Microsoft’s new billionaire buddy in crime, blamed Yahoo's insistence that its current directors and Mr. Yang remain in place for the failure to reach a deal. "They kept talking about corporate governance," Mr. Icahn said, contending that Yahoo's board "is willing to watch the ship go down rather than sell the company." He added: "I delivered everything they wanted but at the end they still didn't want to do a deal."

So in the joint offer (between Microsoft & investor Carl Icahn)that’s made at last Friday night, the proposal envisioned that Microsoft would buy Yahoo's search business and let Mr. Icahn and his slate of directors control the rest of the company. The deal was conditioned on the removal of Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang and its board.

Being the main target of the proxy wars, that’s why Jerry Yang was feeling sulky and depressed. Even though he was accompanied by Google co-founder Larry Page (left) & Sergey Brin (right), in Sun Valley for Allen & Co’s Mogul confab.

Later on, Yang was spotted at Sun Valley Inn in a meeting with former Time Warner’s CEO; Dick Parsons. Most probably he’s asking for advice on how to handle Icahn, and finish the deal with Microsoft.

Now, is it just me or did those Google wonder-boys are smiling at moping Yang? Poor Yang…

Sources are from
Reuters Blog, via Valleywag.

[blogged with my Treo 750v]

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