We are in mid-july of 2008. As the Silicon valley sun gets unusually hot, the temperature at Yahoo is rising fast with Carl Icahn and Microsoft renewing their attacks and new acquistion-plans. The August 1 board meeting is fast approaching and Icahn would like shareholders to vote for a full replacement of the Yahoo board. With a brand new board under Icahn’s chairmanship, future negotiations with Microsoft would become easier. That’s the theory.
Over the weekend, I met couple of Yahoo employees in a social context and its hard not to bring up what’s going on. The remarks from inside is to really see that Yahoo stays as an independent company with its great community and brand undiluted. Yahoo pioneered the notion of a community, way before Google (which does not have a community like Yahoo, but lots of adsense-paying clients) or Microsoft. To fight Google’s rapid progress to the cloud computing world, Microsoft is desperate to find a way and it thinks Yahoo brand can help it.
I think if Yahoo can have a leader such as Mark Hurd at HP ( no nonsense, heads down, operationally savvy) to steer its future, it can still become a greater company with its talents and core technologies.
We will watch how this soap opera ends up at the August 1 board meeting.
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