Yahoo! banks on the power of !

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By Cade Metz in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in IT Director, 7th May 2008 23:25 GMT

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Sue Decker wants you to know that Yahoo! is the only Fortune 500 company with an exclamation point in its name.

"It's an incredible, exciting opportunity to work at Yahoo!, in the things that we're doing, the way we're changing lives - living life with an exclamation point," the Yahoo! president tells Yahoo!'s very own TechTicker webcast. "We're the only Fortune 500 company with an exclamation point in our name, and I think everyone comes to work kinda charged up to prove that."

But, Decker insists, the Yahoo! board did not turn down a $47.5bn marriage bid from Microsoft merely to save its exclamation point. She's adamant that the board turned down Microsoft's bid to make more money for the company's shareholders. "The one guiding light in this process was maximizing shareholder value," she tells TechTickeress Sarah Lacy.

Yes, Yahoo!'s share price is hovering around $25, well below the $33 offer from Microsoft. And, yes, many of Yahoo! biggest shareholders are peeved the deal has fallen through. But Decker claims Microsoft never put that $33 offer in writing, which meant her board couldn't actually share it with the company's top institutional investors.

Regardless, she says that shareholders will eventually be very happy. Yahoo! has a plan to double cashflow to $3.7bn by 2010. She acknowledges that's still a ways away, but points out that if Microhoo happened, investors would wait about a year before pocketing Ballmer's billions. So they're only getting an extra twelve months of misery. If Yahoo!'s plan actually works. And she thinks it will. After all, Yahoo! has an exclamation point in its name.

Bootnote

This just in from comScore: In Europe, Yahoo! controls 2 per cent of the search market. That's less than eBay and a Russian portal called Yandex. The good news is: Decker and company still beat the Polish portals Nasza-Klasa.pl and QXL Ricardo. ®

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