Yang Loses the Battle

Joy to the world, or to none at all./ Yang is going to get emasculated/ And every power that he once had/ Is going to be removed/ Is going to be removed/ And all he'll be left with the board is a simple dude. Excuse the poor choice of words and rhymes, but that's all I could come up with when, in awe, I read about the upcoming hostilities within the Yahoo! board regarding the eventual hostile takeover by Microsoft.

Apart from the sitting and waiting, MS is putting into practice a millennia old tactic, Divide et Impera. Divide and conquer. They started by tearing apart the shareholders' belief in the Yahoo board and now they're waiting for the seeds of what they've sown to bloom, as the board, Terry Semmel-free, is going after Yang's throat. The leader of the 'rebellious' pack is the former CEOs replacement, Roy Bostock, now Chairman. According to the New York Post, among the people having beef with the way Jerry Yang is billionaire Ron Burke.

The cause of dissension is the possibility that Yahoo!'s CEO and his supporters might be acting out of emotion when strongly opposing the Microsoft bid, and thus exposing the board to shareholder lawsuits. Supposedly, the decision should be firstly based on fiduciary duty and not commitment to an ideal.

"While Yahoo!'s board has a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns, running the risk of derailing a deal is dangerous to Yahoo! shareholders," Jefferies analyst Youssef Squali told the cited source. "We believe Yahoo! would have to show substantial re-acceleration in revenue growth and margin expansion for the stock to be back substantially above $30 - something that requires a leap of faith today - if it were to stay independent," he added.

Yang's only shot at keeping things together now is the alliance with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. If that fails, all hell will break loose around him.