Impatient Microsoft

The following letter was composed by Steve Ballmer to the Yahoo! board:

April 5, 2008
Board of Directors
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089

Dear Members of the Board:

It has now been more than two months since we made our proposal to acquire Yahoo! at a 62% premium to its closing price on January 31, 2008, the day prior to our announcement. Our goal in making such a generous offer was to create the basis for a speedy and ultimately friendly transaction. Despite this, the pace of the last two months has been anything but speedy.

While there has been some limited interaction between management of our two companies, there has been no meaningful negotiation to conclude an agreement. We understand that you have been meeting to consider and assess your alternatives, including alternative transactions with others in the industry, but we’ve seen no indication that you have authorized Yahoo! management to negotiate with Microsoft. This is despite the fact that our proposal is the only alternative put forward that offers your shareholders full and fair value for their shares, gives every shareholder a vote on the future of the company, and enhances choice for content creators, advertisers, and consumers.

During these two months of inactivity, the Internet has continued to march on, while the public equity markets and overall economic conditions have weakened considerably, both in general and for other Internet-focused companies in particular. At the same time, public indicators suggest that Yahoo!’s search and page view shares have declined. Finally, you have adopted new plans at the company that have made any change of control more costly.

By any fair measure, the large premium we offered in January is even more significant today. We believe that the majority of your shareholders share this assessment, even after reviewing your public disclosures relating to your future prospects.

Given these developments, we believe now is the time for our respective companies to authorize teams to sit down and negotiate a definitive agreement on a combination of our companies that will deliver superior value to our respective shareholders, creating a more efficient and competitive company that will provide greater value and service to our customers. If we have not concluded an agreement within the next three weeks, we will be compelled to take our case directly to your shareholders, including the initiation of a proxy contest to elect an alternative slate of directors for the Yahoo! board. The substantial premium reflected in our initial proposal anticipated a friendly transaction with you. If we are forced to take an offer directly to your shareholders, that action will have an undesirable impact on the value of your company from our perspective which will be reflected in the terms of our proposal.

It is unfortunate that by choosing not to enter into substantive negotiations with us, you have failed to give due consideration to a transaction that has tremendous benefits for Yahoo!’s shareholders and employees. We think it is critically important not to let this window of opportunity pass.

Sincerely,

Steven A. Ballmer
Chief Executive Office
Microsoft Corp.

Yes, interesting, isn’t it?

“a friendly transaction” - hardly so. Suddenly offering more than 40 billion U.S. dollars without solicitation doesn’t seem very friendly to me. Furthermore, the threat that follows that phrase does not appear friendly.

“tremendous benefits” for shareholders, perhaps not for employees (many of whom will be fired to be replaced!). Not tremendous benefits for the general public and those who actually love Yahoo!

I, for one, hope that this deal is never completed. I hope that the E.U. will stop the merger. Even China has some influence that can prevent the purchase from being completed.

What are your thoughts?

(2 votes, average: 2.5 out of 5)

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Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 5

Yesterday, on April 2, the Mozilla Foundation released the latest beta build of Mozilla Firefox 3, Beta 5. Apparently, there have been 750 changes since Beta 4, and some sites will perform better with Beta 5. A lot of bugs have been fixed, and Gmail is much faster.

A blog on ZDNet covered this release and talked about the memory leak fixes. Someone on CNET also mentioned the Back/Forward button issue, which John C. Dvorak also mentioned on his most recent Tech5 episode.

(3 votes, average: 3.67 out of 5)

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Virgle prank

As part of Google’s annual April Fool’s prank, this year they’ve arranged (in conjunction with Sir Richard Branson) to offer “Virgle: The Adventure of Many Lifetimes“. It’s a trip to Mars in an uncomfortable first-generation spacecraft, and the chance to be part of the first human colony on Mars.

Unfortunately, this thing isn’t for real. It’s very much similar to the previous pranks, except it generated even more hype and wasn’t obviously fake.

Take a look at my post on last year’s prank or another previous prank (Google Gulp).

(3 votes, average: 3.67 out of 5)

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Make WordPress 2.5 look even better

I know I’m harping a bit on how great WordPress 2.5 is, but here’s some eye candy:

The admin backend is extensively pluggable; it’s really easy to create colour themes, and someone has created a plugin that makes it “Stylish Blue“.

I can’t wait to give this sort of awesome interface to my blog service users over at PersonalLog.

(3 votes, average: 2.67 out of 5)

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