Yahoo! faces battle for the board Yahoo! might not have escaped the clutches of Microsoft after all. Activist investor Carl Icahn has confirmed he will fight to take over Yahoo!'s board of directors in order to force through a takeover by Microsoft. Icahn, who succeeded in getting board seats at Motorola, today named the ten people he would like to see …
"I am perplexed by the board’s actions. It is irresponsible to hide behind management’s more than overly optimistic financial forecasts. ......a combination between Yahoo and Microsoft would form a dynamic company and more importantly would be a force strong enough to compete with Google on the Internet." .. http://tinyurl.com/6s8d7a
Pot kettle black calling.
A while ago (1-2 years), the local newspaper chain here in sillycon valley had some directors that wanted to sell the company. They thought it was worth much more than its stock price, so they did sell the company. The resulting sale turned out to be pretty close to the share price at the time, but MUCH less than the "asking price". The only ones that got any $$$ on the deal were the negotiators who worked on a percentage of the deal (they always do!). In the end, everybody got screwed, as a chunk of the assets were then sold again, and lots of people lost jobs. Generally the "value" stayed the same for all involved, and the "sale" people looked like idiots. I note that the paper is now much thinner but Dilbert is still on the comics page documenting life in the cubicles.
I have doubts that Icahn will do much better. The costs of taking over the board, and selling will likely eat into any "premium" that will be paid for the company. Of course, Icahn will make $$$, but not many other people (including stockholders!). So as a previous message says: Yahoo! Shareholders! Beware!!
Mr. "Gerroff my Internets, peasants, you're slowing down my basketball game stream" himself. Yes, the Internet community has a long, if six months qualifies as long, memory.
For those without such a memory, http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Mark-Cuban-Urges-ISPs-to-Block-P2P-89635 may jog yours. I particularly like the South Park-esque avatar someone has cobbled together (yes, yes, I know all about the avatar generator, TYVM).
Jobs, because he has some funny ideas and hates being mocked too.
Give me an example of a tech merger of this size that actually worked.... Oh dear there isn't one. Welcome to cloud cuckoo land.
This has to be for short term gain, there's no other answer. It's this kind of thinking that gave us the sub-prime mortgage fiasco. I really hope he doesn't succeed.
"He and his cronies just wants their slice of the $47.5bn.
Profit motive - a wonderful organising principal for an economy for the benefit of all."
Er, hullo? It is *their* company. *They* paid for those shares and *they* own the company as a result. If you want *your* slice, buy a slice of the company. Come to think of it, you might have done so since "they" are probably mostly the pension funds of ordinary people. Would you be happy if you thought that *your* pension fund was invested in companies making un-profitable decisions? Thought not.
For the benefit of GremlinUK, I think a short economics lesson is in order.
"Profit motive - a wonderful organising principal for an economy for the benefit of all."
Your statement - despite clearly being sarcastic when you wrote it - is actually perfectly true. Just look for an example at the 2 Germanys after the second world war. Both had the same raw materials to work with, yet one has a huge GDP, and both mean and median income are high; the other has a tiny GDP, and mean and median income is low. Why is this? Well, in any society, concentration of capital is key. Let's take an example, if I want to live in an apartment block, with my meagre capital, I'm unable to pay to build one, but I can combine capital with 100 other people and together we can afford to build one. That is capital concentration. In a state driven society, like a communist one, the only place where capital is concentrated is the state. If the state screws something up, they have a monopoly on capital, so they just go again, even if they have a history of screw-ups.
In a capitalist society, pretty much anyone can get there hands on capital. If I have a really good idea, and it makes sense, I can probably persuade someone (or some group of people) to give me seed capital, or even venture capital, either directly, or through stock market flotations. If I screw it up, I'll probably not get another chance, but if I'm really successful, people will start handing out money for bigger and bigger projects. Crucially, we get survival of the fittest, only those people with some sort of track record actually get the chance to keep doing big projects, so in general the big projects are done far more efficiently than in a state run enterprise. Now, the final part of this is that if I get rich from this effort, I want to do something with my money. What I do with it is invest in the stock-market - I become the person providing capital into the system. But, I pick and choose who I give capital to, so I perpetuate the Darwinian process.
Now, my final point in this is to ask you to consider a pound coin. How much is it worth? Well the answer depends on how many times it is used. If I spend it, then the person I give it to spends it, and so on, 100 times in a year, it is worth more than if it sits in my pocket for a year. This is why capitalist countries have higher standards of living, and high mean and median salaries. Crucially, imbalances in the amount of money we have are key to this process - try to remove them and the whole system starts to fail (look at the UK in the 70s with 98% top rate of tax).
For the record - I'm pro Microhoo!
@AC
"Crucially, we get survival of the fittest, only those people with some sort of track record actually get the chance to keep doing big projects, so in general the big projects are done far more efficiently than in a state run enterprise."
Riiiiight. Like the stunning success of transport privatisation: competing buses causing gridlock in major cities while villages have no service and small towns a poor one; huge ticket prices on the trains and most skilled railway maintenance workers retired so no-one's left who can fix anything. Try using a ticket from one company for a return trip if the operator is different and then tell me it wasn't better under BR/regional bus companies.
Or the utilities, eg water: infrastructure still leaking like a sieve while dividends get paid to merkin and French shareholders. So efficient...
"Crucially, imbalances in the amount of money we have are key to this process - try to remove them and the whole system starts to fail (look at the UK in the 70s with 98% top rate of tax)."
Fail - as in being able to provide free health care including optical and dental treatment? As in being able to afford to pay decent pensions? In fact all those things you need to have taxes for which Darwinian capitalists seem to think don't matter because those who aren't greedy shits stomping on the faces of others should just be let to starve and die.
"For the record - I'm pro Microhoo!"
Figures.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
