HOLY CRAP MS WALKS AWAY FROM YAHOO TAKEOVER
I sort of expected this. I even placed a bet on it at hubdub.com, but it was a tiny bet because I sort of thought I'd be wrong.
The deal was always bad for Microsoft, for Yahoo, for everyone, but I thought Microsoft was stupid enough to go through with it. Tonight's news shows that they're not as crazy as I previously thought.
Or are they? The original announcement pushed Yahoo's price up and Microsoft's price down. This made Microsoft's offer less generous than it was at first, but on Monday, Yahoo's price is likely to plummet back down again.
So I wonder: is Microsoft going to try again in a few months? Yahoo will likely have some shareholders angry with them for their positioning in this deal. If so, Yahoo's leadership will be weakened further, making a takeover bid even easier in the future.
So Yahoo will stumble on while people wonder aloud if it'll rise back to its former glory. But they're not the company I'm concerned about. People may think Yahoo is a has-been, hardly relevant in the internet space, helpless against overwhelming Google dominance. And maybe that's all true. But they still have four times the marketshare of Microsoft, the largest software company on the planet, the maker of the most popular browser on earth and the most popular OS.
Yahoo isn't the one underperforming.
