Carl Icahn Takes on Yahoo's Board

narramissic and several others have written to point out that Carl Icahn has initiated a proxy battle with Yahoo's board of directors over their rejection of Microsoft's bid for the company in February. Icahn has purchased millions of Yahoo shares over the past week and assembled a group of nine other investors (including Mark Cuban) to persuade the board to resume talks with Microsoft. Yahoo remains unimpressed. Icahn's letter to Yahoo accuses: "It is unconscionable that you have not allowed your shareholders to choose to accept an offer that represented a 72% premium over Yahoo's closing price of $19.18 on the day before the initial Microsoft offer. I and many of your shareholders strongly believe that a combination between Yahoo and Microsoft would form a dynamic company and more importantly would be a force strong enough to compete with Google on the Internet."

It's not completely their fault

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

What are the odds that the FTC would actually allow a merger like this anyway? I mean the evil power of Microsoft coupled with both of Yahoo's users could mean serious trouble.

Next up

[Mr Z]

Cue Shatner screaming "Icaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahn!"

Re:It's not completely their fault

[martin-boundary]

Nuh, huh! I'm a Linux user, and for the record I have several throwaway fake email accounts on Yahoo, you insensitive clod!

What is the "good technology" from Microsoft?

[Futurepower(R)]

"Microsoft has the opposite problem, i.e. good technology that can convert traffic into advertising revenue, but it was much too late to the game, so it lacks a sufficiently large audience..."

What is the "good technology" from Microsoft?

I just used Microsoft's Live.com to search for "aardvark". Interesting: Google returns a link to Firefox's Aaadvark add-on as the second entry. But Microsoft's live.com never lists the Firefox extension in the first 10 pages.

Can Microsoft be trusted not to be adversarial to customer interests in its search results? Apparently the answer is a big NO. Just that one random search convinced me to never use live.com.

Re:Why is it I know a merger won't be successful..

[mysticgoat]

Parent is currently moderated +5 insightful.

+5 Funny would be more appropriate. It is a wonderful joke.

The joke is confusing Microsoft's fantastic marketing prowess, built upon freedom of encumbrance of any form of ethics, with good technology. Besides, everybody at this point knows that Microsoft's developers developers developers have all cashed in their stock options and gone to more interesting work at Google, IBM, and yea even unto Yahoo. The whole point of that Microsoft - Yahoo deal is that Ballmer misses having some developers around.