Where the Chickens Would Come Home to Roost, If Yahoo and Microsoft Ever Did Do a Search Deal
by Kara Swisher
Posted on January 29, 2009 at 5:19 AM PT
In Yahoo’s fourth-quarter earnings conference call earlier this week, new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz went out of her way to ho-hum all over the possibility of a search deal with Microsoft.
She even went as far as to not even mention its name when she referred to the laggard third player in market share.
And Bartz also tried to make it seem as if a recent meeting between Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock–as well as Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes, who presides over the AOL online service–was fiction. (It was not.)
Of course, it was all cooked up and well-rehearsed by Bartz, who knows how to play the expectations game as well as anyone else, especially as she endeavors to come up to speed on the various prospects for Yahoo going forward.
One person who has been close to the situation said it best: “Anyone would have said the same regardless of their true position at this point.”
Indeed.
Of course, BoomTown’s favorite–and obviously well thought out–line was in answer to an analyst’s question on shareholder value. No surprise: Bartz insisted Yahoo as a whole was, in fact, an unappreciated pearl before swine.
Actually, she used another barnyard metaphor, in the grand tradition of former CEO Jerry Yang’s “sacred cow” debacle.
“This is not a company that needs to be pulled apart and left for the chickens,” said Bartz, using a phrase she said was from her Wisconsin upbringing.
My guess is that the savvy and slick Bartz left that farm behind a long, long time ago and was again using the folksy straight talk in some serious gamesmanship with Microsoft (MSFT) and anyone else.
And perhaps Yahoo (YHOO) is truly not chicken scratch, although a lot of horse sense will be needed in the next few months to make that so.
(No, I could not resist.)
And, employing a video I love, if Bartz ever does succumb to the charms of Microsoft, here’s what the pair might hope that flock of attack poultry would peck at next:
Comments
Kara,
I was rather hoping that your “ticked and tied” memo of last week was going to come true. Following the MSFT-YHOO alliance is excruciatingly painful. Google is waltzing away in market share and Ballmer keeps blabbering about being “open to a search deal”, at some point he needs to make an offer, the long suffering shareholders of YHOO will push to make it happen and I’m confident Carol has a number in mind that she’d be willing to accept, so what the heck is taking these companies so long to do what is so painfully obvious to everyone else but the players. This smells of Yang’s involvement
Posted by michael kane at January 29th, 2009 at 10:01 amyahoo and microsoft search are terrible
so who cares what they do under the sheets?
google search isn’t that good, it’s just BETTER than these lame ones
you’d think with the billions of capital that microsoft and yahoo could at least create a GREAT search engine on their own
really ballmer and yang/filo need to be fired for incompetence all around
Posted by Sam Harrison at January 31st, 2009 at 1:47 pm