Photo: joe-manna / Flickr

The rumour mill is going full tilt with reports that a Microsoft Yahoo marriage may finally happen. Reuters report that the Windows maker is considering making another takeover bid for Yahoo, four years after having a colossal $44.6 billion bid turned down.

Thin rumours

Reuters said that Microsoft may be looking to bid for Yahoo – along with other partners. The news agency cited an unnamed Microsoft executive, who says that even though the Windows maker is interested, other divisions within the big M are not so hot for the deal.

Crazy

Kara Swisher of AllThingsD dismisses these reports, saying categorically that the Windows maker isn’t even looking at Yahoo. She writes: ‘According to my sources, throughout this entire process Microsoft execs have taken pains to make it clear that they are not going to be among the bidders in any significant manner.

In addition, the company has also been communicating with bidders that — while Microsoft is interested in a stable Yahoo, given their search and advertising partnership — it would not throw in with anyone in the process yet.’

You should have said yes

In 2007, a colossal Microsoft Yahoo merger was on the cards when the Redmond giant bid an eye-watering $44.6 billion for the internet portal.  Pretty much everybody looking at the deal was convinced it was a no-brainer and that Yahoo would accept the bid. To most reasonable people’s shock, Yahoo rejected the offer, saying that Microsoft undervalued the company.

Yahoo, for all intents and purposes, has been on a downward spiral since, seeing its value decline as its display advertising market share has shrunk steadily in the face of major competitors like Facebook and even Google. This particular Microsoft Yahoo merger rumour should be treated with a skepticism. It just doesn’t make much sense at surface level.

Photo: Yahoo! – Service de presse / Flickr

With Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz out, the firm putting itself up on the chopping block, and growing investor dissent against the Yahoo board, it looks like one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capitalists, Marc Andreessen, is considering purchasing the media giant.

Where Andreessen fits

Marc Andreessen is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who helped develop the Netscape browser, which, on all accounts, ushered in the modern-day desktop web browser. After a successful stint as an Angel investor, he started a venture capitalist firm with partner Ben Horowitz, simply titled Andreessen Horowitz, that has fast risen to prominence. What makes their interest in acquiring Yahoo so interesting is they also bought Skype when it was a troubled company, an acquisition they would sell at large gains to Microsoft a short few years later.

Trouble looming

Suffice it to say, Yahoo is a very troubled company at present. The Yahoo board of directors have has been under fire since the ousting of CEO Carol Bartz. Chairman of the Board Roy Bostock, in particular, has a bull’s-eye on his back, with certain Yahoo investors calling for him to be put out, too.

Third Point hedge fund-come-activist investor Daniel Loeb is leading the charge in getting the Chairman of the Board thrown out of the company. In a strongly worded letter, he wrote [via AllThingsD]: ‘It is time that certain members of this Board were held accountable for its past failures and their individual roles. Accordingly, we insist that Mr. Bostock, who championed Ms. Bartz’s hiring and led the charge against the Microsoft deal, promptly resign from the Board.’

Given Third Point own 5.1 per cent of Yahoo, and Loeb’s sentiment is reportedly echoed by other Yahoo investors (and tech publications), it will be interesting to see how long Bostock can keep his position for. Moreover, it will be particularly fascinating to see which, if any, big industry players or firms will actually buy Yahoo.

Photo: Yodel Anecdotal / Flickr

Former Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has, for the first time, spoken about her ousting at Yahoo, and how she feels about the board that fired her. Suffice to say, she didn’t have a glowing review of the team.

Fucked over

‘These people fucked me over,’ Bartz told Fortune about the Yahoo board. She revealed that chairman of the board Roy Bostock couldn’t tell her directly that the board had decided to oust her, instead revealing her termination over the phone by reading a scripted lawyer’s letter. Her response? In typical Bartz style, she says her response was a simple ‘I got it. I got it,’ adding ‘I thought you were classier.’

The board is spineless

On a roll, Bartz added that she felt that Yahoo’s board was incompetent, and only fired her so as to appear not to be the worst board in Silicon Valley.

‘The board was so spooked by being cast as the worst board in the country,’ Bartz told Fortune, adding that ‘Now they’re trying to show that they’re not the doofuses that they are.’ She says the primary reason for her firing – and the incompetence they are still trying to cover up for – is rejecting Microsoft’s colossal offer to acquire Yahoo back in 2008. At the time Microsoft offered $44.6 billion to acquire Yahoo – and at a massive premium – a bid that was inexplicably rejected.

What’s next for Bartz

Former Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is well-known for tossing in the occasional expletive during interviews, and when Fortune quizzed her on what she planned next, especially considering her age – 63 – she responded: ‘Fuck you, yeah.’

All things considered, it would be a loss to technology for such a colourful character to fade into obscurity. It’s likely the Yahoo board is not a big fan of Bartz right now, but, truth be told, it appears much of Silicon Valley isn’t a big fan of the board, either.

Photo: superfluity / Flickr

The news that Yahoo had fired CEO Carol Bartz was all over tech sites yesterday. However, just as that news settled, the firm dropped another doozy: a Yahoo acquisition is on the cards, with the company putting itself up for sale. Try not to laugh too much if you recall Microsoft offered a heap of money for the firm three and a half years ago – an offer that was inexplicably rejected.

How we got here

What is bizarre is how the news that Yahoo had put up a FOR SALE sign was buried deep in an article about Bartz’s ousting. You would think that was the big news, yes? But the Wall Street Journal, who were the first to report the plan to sell the company, reported the news as if it were incidental, merely writing: ‘One of these people said Yahoo is open to selling itself to the right bidder.’

Stock reacts positively

Anyhow, as a result of the firing of Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, or the news that the company is open to being acquired, or a combination of the two, the firm’s stock price leapt more than 6 per cent in after-hours trading. At the time of writing, Yahoo’s market cap is $17.31bn (£10.83bn). At this point, it’s safe to say shareholders are happy with the move, but if speculators smell blood, too, Yahoo’s stock price may climb more still.

Let’s revisit Microsoft quickly

While Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz’s ousting was a sudden shock, even if somewhat expected, the manner in which it was done – over the phone – was pretty appalling. To put itself up for sale now, three and a half years after Microsoft offered more than two and a half times Yahoo’s current market cap when it bid $44.6bn (£27.9bn) to buy Yahoo – a bid Yahoo rejected – must rub salt in the wounds of Yahoo shareholders who stuck through the tough times.

Anyhow, spilt milk, right? We’ll see how tech giants respond to the prospect of a Yahoo acquisition. Is it a worthwhile acquisition, given its numerous problems?

Photo: John Federico / Flickr

Yahoo just fired CEO Carol Bartz, and while I can speak little to the merits of the termination, she is certainly one of my favourite personalities in technology. In honour of some of the fantastic things Carol said during her tenure as Yahoo CEO, here are some of the best – and, in hindsight, dumbest – things tech leaders have said over the years.

Bartz tells Arrington where to get off!

And since Carol Bartz inspired the post, it is only appropriate she gets air time first. Perhaps Bartz’s most notorious – and hilarious, and awesome – moment came during the TechCrunch Disrupt conference where she told Michael Arrington to, in no uncertain terms, ‘fuck off’. Seriously, the Yahoo CEO at the time actually said this on stage – here’s the video evidence.

Develop, Ballmer! Develop!

And who can think of Yahoo – and their woes – without thinking back to Microsoft’s attempt to acquire the company back in 2008? Speaking of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, for my money, has had the single greatest moment on stage in technology history. And he did it all with one word, developers, repeated several times for good measure.

Gates was wrong, in hindsight

Before Ballmer took the helm at Microsoft, Bill Gates, who has enough infamous, famous, ingenious, ill-thought and scathing quotes to fill a book by himself, had, in hindsight, one of the most inaccurate predictions in history. He thought Steve Jobs would fail to turn Apple around. At the time of Jobs return in the late 1990s, Gates said: ‘What I can’t figure out is why he (Steve Jobs) is even trying (to be the CEO of Apple)? He knows he can’t win.’

Dell was just reckless

Dell CEO Michael Dell also had a thought to spare on Jobs’ return back in 1997, saying that if he had a choice with what to do with Apple, he would: ‘shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders’. Given that Apple is now the second most valuable company in the world, it’s safe to say shareholders are happy the board didn’t take Michael Dell’s advice.

Which tech CEO has the most quotable quotes out there, in your opinion? Oh and goodbye, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz. Hope you tell more people where to get off in future.

Photo: Yodel Anecdotal / Flickr

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has been fired. As Google, once Yahoo’s biggest competitor, continues to soar, the internet portal has been stagnant for some time now, and the ousting of Bartz comes as no surprise.

Over the phone

What’s worse is Carol Bartz was fired over the phone. Very disrespectful. She sent this very brief note to all Yahoo employees [via TechCrunch]: ‘To all, I am very sad to tell you that I’ve just been fired over the phone by Yahoo’s Chairman of the Board. It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward.’

This has been coming

Back in June already TechCrunch reported that a secret search for a new Yahoo CEO was underway, a claim Yahoo denied, only to, well, fire her three months later. While it is difficult to say whether Bartz’s firing comes as a result of her failure as a leader, she certainly walked into a problem that’s been on the ropes ever since it rebuffed Microsoft’s colossal takeover bid.

In the meantime, CFO Tim Morse will add ‘interim CEO’ to his list of responsibilities while the firm looks for a replacement for Bartz. In the press release announcing the change of leadership, Chairman of the Board Roy Bostock said: ‘The Board sees enormous growth opportunities on which Yahoo! can capitalize, and our primary objective is to leverage the Company’s leadership and current business assets and platforms to execute against these opportunities.’

Finding relevance

What exactly are these opportunities? Yahoo’s problem for the last few years has been that it doesn’t know what it actually is or, perhaps more importantly, what it wants to be. The firm still has some of the biggest internet properties under its umbrella, with plenty of engineering talent under its employ. Can the team focus enough under whoever the new Yahoo CEO will be, or is it in too much disarray to ever return to its pre-2001 heydays?

Photo: Hulu

The rumour mill is gathering momentum on news that online media giant Yahoo is trying to acquire television catchup service Hulu. If this sounds absolutely bizarre in its unexpectedness to you, worry not, most everyone reporting on the news feels that way.

Unsolicited

According to the LA Times Company Town blog, the Yahoo Hulu acquisition bid is completely unsolicited, so even Hulu’s directors have been caught by surprise by the service. Nevertheless, it is believed that with Yahoo being interested in snapping up the video-on-demand service, the board has begun soliciting offers from other companies to see if there is more interest.

The rumour was given legs when the Wall Street Journal began reporting on it, too, but the finance paper cautioned against reports that the deal was as advanced as some believed. Speaking on the matter, the publication writes: ‘These people [WSJ sources] cautioned that Hulu, which is based in Santa Monica, Calif., has not yet determined whether it wants to sell itself and could decide not to. How advanced the discussions are at this stage, or whether financial advisers have been hired, is unclear.’

Wait, what is Yahoo, exactly?

As interesting as the Yahoo Hulu acquisition talk is, it reinforces the widely-held view that Yahoo doesn’t know what it wants to be. The acquisition of the video-on-demand service would no doubt make Yahoo a power player in online video, but does it have enough to fend off competition from Netflix, who, it’s arguable, is as defiant an opponent in video as Google was to Yahoo’s search ambitions?

Given Netflix’s rapid proliferation to set-top boxes, consoles, smart TVs, and even multimedia players, it will be interesting to see how a Yahoo-owned Hulu would compete. Nevertheless, it’s best to file the Yahoo! Hulu chatter in your rumours folder. There are too many unknowns to start taking this one seriously yet.

Photo: Yahoo

Yahoo’s bet on social networking accelerates, but at the expense of admitting Facebook has won the market. With the launch of a revised personal profile, the Yahoo social features get deeper integration with Facebook.

Check its pulse

The revised personal profile service is called Yahoo Pulse and uses Facebook’s Open Graph. This sees Facebook activity stream, including Facebook’s status updates being displayed in the customised user profile page on Yahoo, with displays in Yahoo’s ubiquitous homepage and email service being part of the deal, too. And, in reversal of information flow, this Yahoo Facebook integration will offer users the ability to share Yahoo content on Facebook with ease, too.

What’s the payoff?

Photo: Facebook

With this Yahoo Facebook deal, the major payoff for team Yahoo would be if people spent more time on their site. At least that way the service could monetise page views better and, inadvertently, drive impressions up. But the real payoff of this Yahoo Facebook deal is for Facebook. As web 2.0 services integrate the social networks Open Graph, so the service further cements its place in the market.

What is your core competency?

This latest move sees Yahoo forming an alliance with yet another company where they outsource key business units. Now, one can add Facebook to Microsoft and Nokia as major services that provide a core part of Yahoo’s service. For shareholders, this has to be as much of a concern as it is promising. Sure, the fact that Yahoo is able to align with other properties is encouraging in that they do not feel compelled to go it alone. What is a concern, however, is that every one of these aforementioned partners has better core businesses than Yahoo. Nokia sells lots of phones, Facebook is the preeminent social network, and Microsoft is a colossal company that makes boatloads of money from Office 2010 and Windows 7.

What is Yahoo’s core competency? It seems outsourcing is.

Photo: Foursquare

Foursquare, one of the ‘it’ companies in the consumer Internet space, is said to be strongly considering a sale to Yahoo.

To Yahoo to die

Photo: Stock.Xchng

Though venture capitalists recently offered Foursquare several million dollars at a valuation of an $80 million investment, the company is reportedly taking the Yahoo acquisition offer, which is rumoured to be worth significantly more, very seriously. The problem, as is well documented in technology, is that many promising startups, once acquired by Yahoo, go on to do nothing remarkable. Examples of outright failed and somewhat disappointing acquisitions include photo-sharing site Flickr, and social bookmarking service Delicious.

Band-aid business

As much as this acquisition does not make sense, at least on the surface, for Foursquare, it could be equally disastrous for Yahoo. With their prospects sinking, having sold their search to Microsoft, and influence dwindling, it isn’t as if they have the money to throw around. Beyond that, the death of another promising startup at the hands of Yahoo could be a huge deterrent for promising future startups. More importantly, this seems to be a haphazard solution to trying to reclaim hipness and relevance by purchasing it, which is clearly the wrong approach for the systemic problems they have.

The other angle

Photo: Yahoo

The other viewpoint is Dennis Crowley, Foursquare’s founder, should take the money and run. It’d be a massive payday for the company’s founding team and a good return for its investors, too.

In addition, nothing necessitates that Yahoo will blow this. This could be the promising growth industry that makes the dotcom survivor relevant again. If Yahoo can plug Crowley’s company into its operations and give it the leverage a big player comes with, it may be enough for Foursquare to fend off Facebook, Twitter, and Gowallas imminent threat in the location-based industry.