Yahoo! banks on the power of !
Must! Love! The! Reg!
Posted in Management, 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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COMMENTS
Easter egg
Click on the ! in the logo on the .com homepage to hear the Yahoo yodel.
When I was starting school...
...my teacher used to call ! a "screamer".
So, is Yahoo! banking on a barrage of PR spruking as a future business model? Seems somehow appropriate.
@Pierre
er... not quite. Other search engines are now set as default by many OEM PC providers - Google in particular has been very aggressive at cornering its fair share of the market in this regard.
And there are people who choose to use Live search - not sure why, but they're there.
Am I ...
... the only one thats happy this has fallen through?
I am not a fan of Microsoft by any means (don't hate 'em either though), but absolutely detest Yahoo (sorry guys, you don't deserve the exclamation) and by this having fallen through, we can now guarantee getting a laugh at their expense for even longer!
Hopefully in the meantime, Microsoft can improve Live search (it's been better than Yahoo in terms of quality for years).
Market shares
Search engine market shares... yeah. Yahoo is much more than a search engine actually (Flickr is only an example, they also own a very interesting "collaborative work" solution, and a few shiny things). I don't really love them (and when I need shiny thing, I bend open source solutions to my needs anyway), but "search engine market shares" barely apply. Especially in this context. MS search engine is the default in IE, which is the default in Windows, which is force-fed to the unwashed mass when they buy a computer. And in spite of that, its market share are risible. So from the "search engine market share" point of view, the second search engine in the world refused to be bought by a company that does very poorly in the same classment, in spite of their genuinely unlawfull bundling policy? As far as I know, MS market share in the "search engine" business would be exactly zero if not for the unlawfull bundling of IE with Windows (not to mention the somewhat questionable bundling of Win with quite every PC. Licence refund anyone?). So how exactly is this "search engine market share" thing relevant in this context?
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