To anyone who says that it’s inconsequential that Yahoo understated the level of shareholder dissatisfaction by more than half thanks to a “tabulation error” by its proxy counter, Broadridge, I say: You couldn’t be more wrong. This incident will have ramifications in the coming weeks for the composition of Yahoo’s board.
The great CEOs are always focused on products and product marketing. Three that come to mind: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt. The products are: Mac & iPod, Windows and Google Search. What’s Yahoo’s great product? What’s its marketing focus? … If I were one of the shareholders voting on the proxy, here’s a question I would ask: If Yahoo is going to remain independent, what kind of company is it going to be?
After a funny film featuring nearly every luminary under the sun giving Yang and Decker advice (Buffet, Stringer, Zuckerberg, etc) Yang and Decker took the stage and Walt immediately asked them about the MSFT deal. Yang agreed that they could not get to a price, but that there were other issues as well, regulatory is one that came up, but I can imagine others (ie, approach to open source, total installs of Outlook at Yahoo, etc.!).
One more Microhoo observation before:
A) They announce the tech deal of the century.
B) They go to the mattresses.
C) They continue to screw around just to keep us sleep-deprived.
So let’s assume that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wakes up tomorrow and Yahoo’s a done deal. First order of business is to find the right person for the job. But that’s where Ballmer’s going to have to summon the wisdom of Solomon.
I hadn’t expected Terry Semel to step down on Monday. Less than a week before, after Yahoo’s annual meeting in Santa Clara, Calif., he approached me. He was quite affable, considering that we had had a pointed exchange during the earlier Q&A session and that I led a group of 100 shareholders owning 2 million [...]
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