Yahoo Faces Shareholder Ire Over Failed Microsoft Bid

By Dan Nystedt
Mon, May 05, 2008

IDG News Service —

Two public pension funds from the city of Detroit plan to expand a complaint against Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and other members of Yahoo's board of directors, saying they failed to act in the best interest of shareholders in rejecting Microsoft's bid to buy Yahoo.

Their original lawsuits were filed separately on March 5 over what the pension funds deemed an unreasonable attempt by Yahoo's management team to thwart an acquisition by Microsoft that would have paid shareholders a 62 percent premium over Yahoo's pre-bid stock price. The lawsuits have been combined into a general class-action lawsuit, and lawyers representing the pension funds say they will seek damages for the loss of shareholder value allegedly caused by Yahoo management over the failure of the bid this weekend.

The actions taken by Yahoo's CEO this past weekend confirm that the company's board of directors pursued all manner of value-destructive third-party deals to fight off Microsoft's bid, lawyers representing the Police & Fire Retirement System of the City of Detroit and the General Retirement System of the City of Detroit said in a statement Monday.

Those actions constitute a breach of fiduciary duty, they allege.

Microsoft announced its original $44.6 billion acquisition bid on Feb. 1, sending Yahoo shares up as high as $29.83 each on the day, a huge increase from $19.18 before the offer. Yahoo first rejected the bid on Feb. 11, but did enter talks with Microsoft. In the end, the deal fell apart despite a sweetened offer of $33 per share from Microsoft.

Yahoo shares fell 15 percent on Monday to $24.37, after dropping to as low as $22.97 earlier in the day.

Yahoo appears to have sought several alternatives to the Microsoft deal, including reportedly trying a tie-up with Google on its search advertising business. Lawyers for the pension funds, Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossman LLP, say attempts at such deals show that Yang never negotiated with Microsoft in good faith.

Yahoo did a two-week test run of Google ads in April, but hasn't disclosed the results.

You are here: Business/Management Topics » IT Organization » News

Most Recent IT Organization Stories

White Papers »

Converged Infrastructure for Dummies

As you know, everything is mobile, connected, interactive, and immediate. This is exactly why organizations need a highly agile IT infrastructure in order to keep pace with extreme fluctuations in business demand. This book will help you understand why infrastructure convergence has been widely accepted as the optimal approach for simplifying and accelerating your IT to deliver services at the speed of business while also shifting significantly more IT resources from operations to innovation.

Quantifying the Business Value of VMware View

For this white paper, IDC performed an in-depth analysis of the business value of VMware View, defined as the expected ROI associated with the use of the solution as a platform for the targeted deployment of a virtual desktop infrastructure.

Virtualization reduces costs and complexity for mid-sized businesses

This paper explains virtualization, its benefits for mid-sized business and how IBM's virtualization strategy can help these companies reduce costs, improve services and simplify management.

A Standard Branch Office IT Platform to Optimize and Consolidate

Forrester Research makes recommendations on best practices to optimize branch virtualization and consolidation initiatives. See how a "thin" branch architecture, with key servers, services and applications in the data center that relies on a high-performing WAN connection, can offer the greatest efficiencies.

Maintaining Continuous Compliance - a new best practice approach

When trying to achieve continuous compliance with internal policies and external regulations, organizations need to replace traditional processes with a new best practice approach and new innovative technology, such as that provided by IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager.

Rewriting the rules of Patch Management

IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager helps organizations automatically manage patches for multiple operating systems and applications across hundreds of thousands of endpoints regardless of location, connection type or status.

Webcasts »

Apps QuickStart Series Part 2: Designing and Deploying SQL Server on VMware vSphere

Download this webcast to learn about the design considerations for virtualizing SQL workloads, performance and scalability information and high-availability options, as well as support considerations

Quantifying the Business Value of VMware View - Webcast

Many enterprises have discovered that the use of virtualization to support desktop workloads creates a range of significant benefits. These benefits include price efficiencies, improved IT management and greater agility and choice for end users.

This VMware sponsored webcast with IDC will provide both quantitative measurement of the business value -- defined as the expected ROI -- and qualitative analysis associated with the use of VMware View™. IDC will also provide an analysis of the View Composer and ThinApp™ features of VMware View, including the business value of these solutions and an overview of how they work.

Attend this webcast to learn about:
- Challenges and barriers that might impede the adoption of desktop virtualization
- Navigating roadblocks to facilitate a strategic implementation
- Optimizing qualitative and quantitative benefits to IT and your business

Architecting a Modern Approach to Data Management

Applications are changing - they're increasingly web-oriented, global in nature and run from multiple device types. Additionally, the volume of data is growing exponentially every year. How do you ensure your applications have fast, accurate, up-to-date information in this new world? Modern applications are data-intensive; delivering data the old way using monolithic databases isn't working. What's needed is a modern approach to data. One that scales-out as needed and delivers predictable high performance, but without sacrificing data consistency or integrity.

Introduction to VMware View 5

VMware View™ 5 simplifies IT management while increasing end user freedom by delivering desktop services from your cloud. Building upon VMware's leadership in desktop virtualization, VMware View 5 delivers a high-performance user experience while giving IT greater policy control.

View this webcast and find out how VMware View 5 can help you:
- Deliver the highest fidelity experience of desktop services across any device and any network
- Simplify and automate IT management, security and control of desktop services
- Reduce the costs associated with your desktop environment

The CIO's View: Time-to-Value Through Automation

IT professionals are being asked to deliver faster "time-to-value" than ever before. An IDG Research survey found that CIOs are eager to invest in technologies that will enable them to get new applications and services up quickly, achieving faster time-to-value.

5 Steps to Successful IT Consolidation

Learn how to reduce IT management overhead, ease revision control, guarantee data security, scale systems more quickly and reduce server and software costs.

Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter