Icahn to Yahoo!: It's On

[mj]

Call it the "Carl Icahn Treatment."


After news surfaced on Tuesday that the billionaire activist investor would be waging a proxy fight over Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ), new reports announced that Icahn has lined up a slate of 10 directors to replace the web portal's board and bring Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) back to the table.


There's a hitch though. Yahoo! has set a Thursday deadline for submitting candidates to oppose its board at the company's July 3 annual meeting. Wednesday's report was first published on the Wall Street Journal's website.
Icahn is hoping to restart Yahoo!'s failed negotiations with Microsoft, which fell apart less than two weeks ago. O ther activists had thought about waging a proxy battle, but gave up when they didn't feel confident Microsoft would back them. Yahoo! is a perfect opportunity for Icahn, who specializes in shaking up companies with questionable management. He typically takes a minority stake and agitates for change, often getting board representation, as was the case at Motorola (nyse: MOT - news - people ) and ImClone (nasdaq: IMCL - news - people ).


The fight could get ugly--just look what's happened since he moved on Motorola.
At Yahoo! Icahn has reportedly accumulated 50 million, or about 2% of the company's shares in order to position himself to capitalize on investor discontent for turning down Microsoft Chief Executive Seve Ballmer's very public $47.5 billion, or $33 per share, offer. The software company gave up after Yang and the board insisted on at least $37.

http://www.forbes.com/markets/2008/0...markets12.html


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[rhys]

Yahoo management deserves this treatment. Totally irrational, irresponsible behavior to the detriment of its shareholders. As for myself, very glad we retracted the offer, would have been a clusterf*ck.

[thefabfive]

Agreed. The best thing for MSFT was to walk way from that mess. Yahoo will now take a well deserved and very public beating.

[Clotho]

Speaking of clusterf*cks. I upgraded(downgraded) to Vista. I went from a perfectly stable machine running XP to the complete and total nightmare that is Vista. It wasn't even functional at first until I contacted EVGA and found out that the 7900gt's that I had SLI'd were not compatible with Vista (Video Cards) even though they were marked as being compatible on the box when I purchased them. So I go buy a new Video card. Now at least the machine runs. The only problem is that I get between 2 and 6 blue screens of death at random intervals during the day. Completely random. No way to determine the cause of the problem other than to throw more hardware at it.

Microsoft deserves the public beating.

[Fka200]

Originally Posted by Clotho

Speaking of clusterf*cks. I upgraded(downgraded) to Vista. I went from a perfectly stable machine running XP to the complete and total nightmare that is Vista. It wasn't even functional at first until I contacted EVGA and found out that the 7900gt's that I had SLI'd were not compatible with Vista (Video Cards) even though they were marked as being compatible on the box when I purchased them. So I go buy a new Video card. Now at least the machine runs. The only problem is that I get between 2 and 6 blue screens of death at random intervals during the day. Completely random. No way to determine the cause of the problem other than to throw more hardware at it.

Microsoft deserves the public beating.

I also installed Vista only to find my video card wasn't "perfectly" supported.... back to XP! What a waste of money.

[Clotho]

I apologize for the derail. I just wanted to point out that Microsoft wasn't exactly clean in the incompetence department either.

It looks like I may have to switch back to XP as well. Quite simply Vista doesn't work. I'm not dealing with cheap junk hardware either. At this point if I have to consider starting from scratch again I am giving serious consideration to switching to Apple.

[rhys]

Originally Posted by Clotho

I apologize for the derail. I just wanted to point out that Microsoft wasn't exactly clean in the incompetence department either.

It looks like I may have to switch back to XP as well. Quite simply Vista doesn't work. I'm not dealing with cheap junk hardware either. At this point if I have to consider starting from scratch again I am giving serious consideration to switching to Apple.

True, in my experience as a management consultant, there is plenty of incompetence to go around. Show me an incorporated entitity, and I will show you incompetence. Microsoft is no exception, like Apple and Google, IBM and GE, it's fraught with poor decisions and poor decision makers.

[touchring]

Originally Posted by rhys

True, in my experience as a management consultant, there is plenty of incompetence to go around. Show me an incorporated entitity, and I will show you incompetence. Microsoft is no exception, like Apple and Google, IBM and GE, it's fraught with poor decisions and poor decision makers.

Microsoft should either use all US developers or outsource to China (Beijing), Russia, Ukraine or South America. The standards are getting tougher and people don't use poorly developed software. You can't get away with betaware nowadays. People expect the first version to work like it were the 3rd version.

With all the profits that Microsoft earns, i can't see why you would want to save on a few hundred dollars per developer. lol.

[rhys]

Originally Posted by touchring

Microsoft should either use all US developers or outsource to China (Beijing), Russia, Ukraine or South America. The standards are getting tougher and people don't use poorly developed software. You can't get away with betaware nowadays. People expect the first version to work like it were the 3rd version.

With all the profits that Microsoft earns, i can't see why you would want to save on a few hundred dollars per developer. lol.

The issues are not about cost-cutting or even about access to talent.

[touchring]

It is a talent issue. Given equal market exposure, people use the better software. Do you use google or msn to search (at home? ).