Yahoo, sick of them yet?

The Yahoo-Microsoft-Ichan soap opera got pretty damn annoying for a while there. In fact It wasn’t even so much Yahoo and Microsoft, it was billionaire investor Ichan who really made it all so stupid.

I got nothing wrong with people making money, lots of money. In fact I wish I could. However I do resent billionaires constantly bitching about the evils of corporate America and why it’s difficult for them to gain control of any company the want.

“The poison pill prevents any shareholder, or a group of shareholders acting in concert, from owning more than a certain percentage of a company by allowing all other shareholders to purchase shares at a lower price in the event one chooses to cross the ownership line (typically 15%) without prior permission from the company. This effectively kills the value of their investment – hence the name, "poison pill". Public companies refer to a poison pill as a "shareholder rights plan". Does anyone else find that amusing? If anything, it undermines shareholder rights rather than supporting them.”

Sure, CEO’s and businessmen making multi-million dollar salaries while their companies go down the pooper is pretty lame, but wresting control of companies and forcing your ego on them to make yourself a quick buck is equally so. Considering how Ichan has reacted in this whole situation, can you blame any company for wanting to prevent it also happening to them?

I think the thing which annoys me the most is that Ichan seemingly never gives a crap about the actual future of a company beyond making a quick buck for himself and other shareholders. Yes, I guess that’s the whole point of the stock market but there has to be more to it than that.

A Microsoft-Yahoo acquisition would have been a disaster, and I respect the Yahoo board for not simply selling out. However their management of the whole process was a joke. Their statements concerning Ichan not having Yahoo’s best interest in mind where correct, but unfortunately the had trouble articulating what their own future plans where.

Jerry Yang also can never seem to make the hard decisions necessary for a CEO, such as perhaps cutting Yahoo’s products down to make themselves far more profitable and manageable. The classic example is of course Steve Jobs, how gave advice to both Yang and the rest of the Yahoo executives. Yang never followed through on the suggestions, instead preferring to spend millions on investment.

It’s not all bad, hopefully Yahoo can pull itself out of this hole, after all the company is still a multi-million dollar Internet giant and has been introducing some fantastic initiatives such as promoting their open social networking development plans and introducing things like the Yahoo Music API for developers as reported by Mashable.

We can only wait and see.