At least four professors at the Wharton School of Business contributed to an article about the challenges faced by Yahoo’s new chief executive titled: “Carol Bartz’s Challenge at Yahoo: Choose a Path, Build a Team and Do It Fast”.
Don’t worry about a lot of deep academic analysis. Here’s a sample of what Wharton management professor Lawrence Hrebiniak had to say: Read the rest of this entry »
Yahoo said today it has amended a controversial employee severance agreement it adopted last February less than two weeks after Microsoft made its unsolicited offer to buy the Internet giant, according to a regulatory filing. The severance program guaranteed a mix of cash and stock payments to all 13,800 Yahoo employees if they were fired or quit after being reassigned to a new job within two years after a Microsoft takeover.
The number of months of severance that were to be paid under the plan were called Read the rest of this entry »
Remember way back in the beginning of this year when Microsoft supposedly said it was willing to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion? (And that was before the company reportedly was willing to bump the offer up even more).
Well, not that I’m actually suggesting anyone do this, but…Thanks to the stock markets’ implosion, if you had enough spare change lying under your couch, you could now buy eBay AND Yahoo for less than that. Read the rest of this entry »
Two directors on Yahoo’s board traded in opposite directions earlier this month. Eric Hippeau, who has served as a Yahoo director since 1996, decided to rid himself of 40 percent of his Yahoo stock holdings Nov. 6, a day after Google dropped plans to enter an advertising deal with Yahoo, when he sold Read the rest of this entry »
Topic A for discussion this morning are the insider trading charges filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission against former “Dancing With The Stars” also-ran Mark Cuban. Oh, and he’s also the guy who owns the Dallas Mavericks, wants to buy the Chicago Cubs, and has an ego the size of Silicon Valley.
The complaint filed Monday contains the good, old-fashioned kind of allegations. You can read the full complaint here. In essence, the SEC claims that Cuban was an investor in the search engine Mamma.com. Back in 2004, the company briefed him on plans to issue a new round of stock, which would likely dilute shareholder value and cause the stock price to drop. Also, Cuban was ordered not to tell a soul.
According to the SEC, Cuban called his broker and told him to dump his Mamma.com shares. The stock dropped almost 10 percent the next day, and Cuban saved about $750,000. Nice (allegedly).
You can read the full complaint here. But Gawker provides the highlights here.
One of the tastiest morsels from the complaint comes from a conversation between Cuban and the Mamma.com CEO:
“The CEO prefaced the call by informing Cuban that he had confidential information to convey to him, and Cuban agreed that he would keep whatever information the CEO intended to share with him confidential. The CEO, in reliance on Cuban’s agreement to keep the information confidential, proceeded to tell Cuban about the PIPE offering. Cuban became very upset and angry during the conversation, and said, among other things, that he did not like PIPES because they dilute the existing shareholders. At the end of the call, Cuban told the CEO “Well, now I’m screwed. I can’t sell.”
But then, apparently, he did sell. Allegedly.
And what does Mr. Cuban have to say about all of this? Read the rest of this entry »
Carl Icahn placed a bet on Advanced Micro Devices in the third quarter, acquiring 1.6 million shares of the Sunnyvale chip maker, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Friday in which his investment company, Icahn Capital, periodically details its holdings.
The stake was valued at Read the rest of this entry »
Confirming recent scuttlebutt, Google announced Wednesday that it was walking away from its advertising partnership with Yahoo. According to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice, the agency had told the pair that it planned to file a suit to block the deal:
“Yahoo! Inc. and Google Inc. abandoned their advertising agreement after the Department of Justice informed the companies that it would file an antitrust lawsuit to block the implementation of the agreement. The Department said that, if implemented, the agreement between these two companies accounting for 90 percent or more of each relevant market would likely harm competition in the markets for Internet search advertising and Internet search syndication.
“The companies’ decision to abandon their agreement eliminates the competitive concerns identified during our investigation and eliminates the need to file an enforcement action,” said Thomas O. Barnett, Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Department’s Antitrust Division. “The arrangement likely would have denied consumers the benefits of competition–lower prices, better service and greater innovation.”
As I wrote the other day, I think the notion that this deal raised anti-trust issues was wrongheaded. And I think Google and Yahoo could have won a court fight. The problem was that this would take time and money. And the deal didn’t really matter that much to Google from a financial perspective to invest all those resources in fighting to save it. Google was doing it, probably, just to thumb its nose at Microsoft and disrupt its bid for Yahoo.
For Yahoo, on the other hand, this is a body blow. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s become increasingly clear that the U.S. Department of Justice is building a case against the proposed ad deal between Google and Yahoo. And now there are rumblings that Google may walk away from the deal. Amid this speculation, there’s more talk that Yahoo and AOL are sniffing around each other again for some possible deal. If the Google deal collapses, Yahoo apparently feels it needs something to get its stock price going and buy it some time to implement its new “open” strategy.
All this hand wringing over the Google deal, however, has left me shaking my head.
Recall that Yahoo signed the deal with Google as a way to thwart the takeover bid by Microsoft. Not the greatest move in the world. But still, I don’t understand the firestorm of protest over it.
Here’s why: Read the rest of this entry »
Nielsen Online released its U.S. search share rankings for August this morning. Depending on your point of view, the failure of the Microsoft bid for Yahoo may have been a blessing, at least in the short term. Yahoo Search handled 1.3 billion queries in August, down 16.5 percent year over year, and representing 18.1 percent of all search requests in August.
And Microsoft? Even worse, Read the rest of this entry »
California Attorney General Jerry Brown (pictured) is evidently reviewing company documents about Google ’s proposed partnership with Yahoo, according to a report by Bloomberg News.
The review was disclosed in a letter from Brown’s office to California Assemblyman Joel Anderson, a Republican from El Cajon, who asked Brown to start an antitrust investigation to determine whether the proposal is anticompetitive, according to the article. Read the rest of this entry »
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