Dear Jerry
I’m fascinated by corporate communications. Steve’s note to Jerry is fantastic.
Microsoft Withdraws Proposal to Acquire Yahoo!
Allow me to paraphase it:
Dear Jerry,
Here is a letter that I’m sending to the world so I’ll start off really nice.
Your shareholders would have made lots of money from our offer.
We upped our offer which demonstrates we were willing to do a deal.
You put yourself ahead of your shareholders and therefore they will sue you.
Here is all the ammunition they need for suing you.
- Your strategy is bad for Yahoo
- Your key staff will leave
- No one else could buy you, so your shareholders really lost out
- You are handing the market to Google
- Just repeating, no one else could buy you, so your shareholders really lost out
Your stock will tank on Monday. Did I mention that your shareholders should sue you?
Look forward to watching you deal with that.
Steven
blog
Spot on, Rod.And so much wittier than my post!
[...] Rod Drury has written a witty paraphrase of Balmer’s letter to Yang. Trackback [...]
Jerry just got utterly out-flanked by /s/ and friends but then was that so hard given Yahoo’s listless lurching of recent years?
Hold onto that AAPL Rod - hope you didn’t swap into Yahoo!
What reason did Microsoft actually have for buying Yahoo? None whatsoever I could detect. The only thing it would do was to take down a competitor, because the Yahoo brand and services would be subsumed by the MSN brand.
That the share price drops is understandable. It hiked when M$ put billions on the table. The gamblers lost. And suing is a way of life in the US.
But also note this: At $24.47, the stock is comfortably above its January 31 close of $19.18, before Microsoft disclosed its unsolicited offer.
Not only is your version much more entertaining, it makes a better piece of writing for the Web. Next time, Steve should set himself a real challenge and write his message to Jerry using Twitter.
Easy …
Steven: @Jerry It’s off. You screwed us, I screw you.
Or in txt:
fo. u f me, fu!
Rod, Take a look at this commentary from US stock market / business expert Jim Cramer:
Icahn’s a Pro, Yang’s an Amateur
05/15/2008 3:01 PM
Yahoo! ke), be prepared to get pantsed. Carl Icahn has spent much of his life working just on the kind of situations that CEO Jerry Yang just engineered — a situation where entrenched management doesn’t own a lot of stock but doesn’t want to lose its job and is willing to screw all of the other shareholders.
I have believed from the beginning that Yahoo! did not deal in good faith with Steve Ballmer of Microsoft . I believe that every time Ballmer tried to reach a deal, Yang went higher. He wasn’t a seller because he believed he owned the company.
Now Icahn has put together a slate that I think can be a winner. I think he knows that you can buy the stock at $23-$25 and flip it to Microsoft after the election.
I think he is right. And I think he will have the support of a lot of shareholders, new and old alike, who feel like they’ve got a great opportunity or they have been wronged. I imagine that Capital World, which just disclosed a big holding, isn’t a Yang supporter. The day this deal broke down, the stock should have broken to $22. It didn’t, I believe, because Icahn saw this kind of hubris and wanted to get to work. I predicted it immediately on “CNBC Squawk Box” and on video because Icahn lives for these situations.
Icahn’s a pro, Yang’s an amateur.
59m shares brought at $23 sold 6 months later for $33 (if he gets Microsoft back at the table, which his record suggests he will) - thats a $590m profit (in 6 months) proberly with no money down- WOW. People should realize that this is why the rich get richer (acting on opportunities) not because they are evil villains who rip off the poor!