Image: Microsoft and Yahoo Corporate Brand Identities
My friend Dean commented recently that he bet Yahoo was wishing they had accepted Microsoft’s offer to buy the company not so long ago. When he made the comment, Yahoo stock was at $14.50.
I just looked today and Yahoo stock is at a whopping $8.95 according to Market Watch. Microsoft’s offer was $33/share when Yahoo and Jerry Yang said no to the offer and felt rebuffed that they would be offered so low a price and would never sell to a company the likes of Microsoft.
I still think Yahoo should sell to Microsoft. …read more

More news today on the Microsoft and Yahoo front. Supporting Carl Icahn’s desire to get a new board in place at Yahoo, Microsoft says they’d be interested in talking again to Yahoo about a buyout and merger.
Microsoft’s support of Icahn also intensifies the pressure on Yahoo co-founder and Chief Executive Jerry Yang, whose handling of the earlier sales negotiations with Microsoft infuriated many shareholders.

What do you make of this latest development? Personally I think it’s exactly the thing that I expected to happen eventually. Yahoo’s Yang didn’t make any friends with his bold rebuff of Microsoft’s original offer.
There’s the talk …read more

I just caught an article by Mary Jo Foley where she shares some interesting items that took place around the Yahoo camp during Microsoft’s quest to take over the company. The two most interesting items for me were:

Employee compensation poison pill
Yahoo managers didn’t want Google partnership

First, Yahoo made it more worthwhile for Yahoo employees to leave the company than to stay if purchased by Microsoft. It’s a poison pill that makes the company very unattractive for potential bidders. I don’t understand why anyone would want a company they worked for to act like that.
The other tool that …read more