Mark Cuban Agrees Yahoo Should Sell

I was just reading on the Blog Maverick site of Mark Cuban that he believes Yahoo! should sell to Microsoft as well. His reasons are very different from my own but make a lot of sense too.

That’s a problem for Jerry. Building a world class Yahoo to be the best company it possibly can be using the management skills that Jerry and company have is a far different challenge than optimizing the stock price. Particularly when Google is your stock comp.

Which is exactly why Jerry and David should sell to MSFT.

If there is one thing Microsoft does well , its ignore Wall Street and invest in its corporate strategies. It has so many huge lines of business, that Wall Street has learned to just let those that need to germinate do so. XBox. MSN. Online. Microsoft gets more leash from Wall Street to develop businesses than any company on the planet.

So the question isn’t whether Yahoo should sell. It should. The only question is what the structure of the deal should look like so that Jerry and David can achieve many of the goals they set out to accomplish on the net under the MSFT umbrella. Jerry definitely is about customers first. This is his chance to show it. This deal accelerates his opportunity to get customers where he wants to take them if he negotiates it right. Something I dint think would be that hard. There is too much upside for Microsoft to nitpick the non financial deal points.

The idea that Yahoo! would have freedom to do what Yahoo set out to do is very interesting. I think some of Yahoo’s problem is that they’ve kept stretching for things to get involved with and do to make Wall Street happy, taking them further away from their core efforts. Being protected from Wall Street by the big Microsoft shield is a valid concept in my opinion as well.

Photo Source: Los Angeles Times