RSSNow Microsoft will take its case to Yahoo's shareholders
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published February 11, 2008, 6:25 PM
In a statement late Monday afternoon, Microsoft responded to Yahoo's rejection of its initial takeover bid as many believed it would, and as the company itself indicated it probably might do: It will ask Yahoo shareholders to consider its proposal.
With no absolute white knight in sight, though with a few candidates for the job having been mulled around, Yahoo's executives may find themselves now pleading their case for independence with their company's own stockholders. As expected, Microsoft plans to pursue its takeover of Yahoo by way of "Plan B:" a direct offer to shareholders to override their own board of directors.
What follows is Microsoft's complete statement, directed not to Yahoo's board of directors but to the general public on behalf of the company:
We are offering shareholders superior value and the opportunity to participate in the upside of the combined company. The combination also offers an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market.
A Microsoft-Yahoo! combination will create a more effective company that would provide greater value and service to our customers. Furthermore, the combination will create a more competitive marketplace by establishing a compelling number two competitor for Internet search and online advertising.
The Yahoo! response does not change our belief in the strategic and financial merits of our proposal. As we have said previously, Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo!'s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal.
yahoo claims to be worth a lot more than what ms is offerring and yet yahoo supposedly has financial troubles.
to me yahoo is a dot.com balloon and any company that will pay more for it than what its worth, will only be inflating that balloon even more.
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|Just like MS, sees buying out the competition until they own it all as "competitive" and good for the marketplace. Face it, MS can't believe someone said no )they used to do that a lot years ago) to them, so they will use WMD (no, not Weapons of Mass Destruction, but Whatever May Destroy)
I am all for businesses prospering but innovation is born from competition and we need something new... I had HOPES for Vista, a totally new os from MS instead yet just another facelift on the aged windows platform...
I remember the good old days, there was many choices for people to use for OSes, all had their plusses and minuses.. now we have what.. ms, linux and ? I wished ms would dump OLE and finally make a true object oriented os... with all that money and all those cosers, you would think they could do something different..
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|"now we have what.. ms, linux and ? "
Windows, MANY different flavors of Linux, OSX, unix.
I mean...how many OS's do you want developers to develop applications for? You want it to be like gaming consoles? Oh you want to use this app? You need linux, but if you want that app you need windows, oh and ifyou want that other app you need mac...might as well get them all!
Don't get me wrong...competition is great, but you get diminishing results at a certain point. And currently there is plenty of competition in the OS market...isn't apple's share rising quickly??
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|So when other company buys, it's ok. Now when Microsoft buy, it suddenly become anti-competitive? Last I check, the combine search market share of Live and Yahoo is much less than Google?
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|We're not talking OS market share here, we're talking search share. Google is the king of search and two years from now it will still be king. They're smarter, more innovative, and they got there first. Notice that MS clearly stated that they planned to be the #2 provider through this merger and not #1. Not that they'd mind topping google--but they're smart enough to know that's not going to happen anytime soon.
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|"They tried to make me go to Redmond, I said, No! No! No!"
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|No amount of capitalist reasoning while make it a good thing to destroy the independence of a company like Yahoo.
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|Huh?
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|Um...what???
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|i hope ms is successful, then gets rid of yahoo...jk ;)
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