Search News Desk
Yahoo! How Like the Virgin Mary!
Yahoo's Stock Price Successfully Defies Gravity
May. 11, 2008 08:45 AM
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So how does it feel to have witnessed one of technology’s
little miracles this week?
I mean Yahoo’s stock price successfully defying gravity.
It’s as close as any of us will ever get to an apparition of
the Virgin Mary floating on a cloud without any visible means of support.
Apparently Wall Street isn’t convinced that Microsoft has
indeed pushed on despite leaks that it has reached out instead to Facebook,
another company with an inflated view of itself.
Microsoft is supposedly interested in buying the 98.4% of
Facebook it doesn’t own. Remember last year it took a 1.6% position in the
social networking site for $240 million and serves ads to the thing.
Facebook then thought it was worth $15 billion. Goodness
knows what it thinks now and whether founder Mark Zuckerberg could bring
himself to sell rather than IPO.
Facebook is expecting to do $300 million-$350 million in
revenue this year, double or better last year, on the back of 110 million
visitors a month now
The news has also leaked – great how that happens – that
Microsoft has released its slate of substitute directors, the guys it was going
to install at Yahoo if it made a hostile run on the company.
They are now free to be nominated by Yahoo’s own stockholders
if the stockholders can stay angry long enough to try to unseat Yahoo
management all by themselves. They have to move in the next few days. Yahoo set
its stockholders meeting for July 3.
Microsoft folk like Bill Gates and Craig Mundie have sent
little messages through the press saying Microsoft has washed its hands of
Yahoo and its CEO, who effectively stood on a street corner and lit a victory
cigar with a $47.5 billion-dollar bill.
He’s apparently more comfortable sticking his head in the
lion’s mouth and cutting a deal with Google, if he can get it. Google suddenly
seems a lot more ambivalent than it was about helping out its rival. Google CEO
Eric Schmidt said Thursday there was no deal yet, only reason to talk.
About Maureen O'GaraMaureen O'Gara is the Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025.