With Yahoo board Chairman Roy Bostock reportedly assuring investors and others that the company will have a CEO in place by the end of the year, it seems prudent for BoomTown to initiate an official Yahoo CEO Countdown.

After all, this column had a 100-Day No-Sacred-Cows Vision Quest to mark the time that Jerry Yang said he needed to give Yahoo a top-to-bottom look-see when he took over last summer as CEO.

So here’s today’s update: No Peter Chernin and a lot of thorny issues for other candidates.

Read More »

Now let’s return from the land of fatuous deal schemes and half-baked plots to buy Yahoo and get to the most critical issue facing its board right now: Finding a new CEO to replace outgoing leader Jerry Yang.

Sources tell BoomTown that board Chairman Roy Bostock has been asserting a new CEO will be named by the new year.

Only 28 more shopping days until management clarity!

Well, maybe not so much, given there is no formal search committee. But there is a list and a pending AOL deal, so let’s hope for a miracle on 701 First Avenue in Sunnyvale!

Read More »

Yesterday, after the news got out that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang was stepping down from his job and that a search was on for a new CEO, BoomTown got inundated with reaction from everyone from readers of this blog to Internet players to Yahoo employees.

In fact, my single favorite quote came from one Yahoo staffer: “You can kick this dog, but it still barks.”

Grrrrr…this and some Yahoo myths explored within.

Read More »

As BoomTown reported earlier today in an exclusive scoop, Yahoo has confirmed that CEO Jerry Yang will be stepping down and a search for his replacement is underway.

Heidrick & Struggles will conduct the search for a new CEO, who is likely to come from outside the company.

Here is the entire Yahoo press release about the development…

Read More »

BoomTown has obtained the entire memo from Jerry Yang to his employees at Yahoo about his plans to step down as Yahoo CEO.

Yang, a truly nice man–which has been a plus and a minus for him–and an Internet visionary for sure, penned a classy note to the Yahoo troops. And BoomTown, feeling sentimental, will not even make fun of the lack of capitalization this time.

Here’s the memo…

Read More »

Yesterday–in a patented playbook move–some top Microsoft execs didn’t miss a chance to slap around Yahoo over its shareholder vote debacle, letting it be known to industry insiders (on the very loud QT, of course) that the Internet company knew full well that its biggest investor, Capital Research & Management, was going to vote a large number of shares against it.

In essence, Microsofties are arguing that knowledge of a major investor’s dissatisfaction should have prompted Yahoo to question its unusually positive voting results at its annual meeting on Friday and ask the outside voting tabulator to recheck its numbers before officially releasing them.

While BoomTown is careful to consider the sources here–the collapse of Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo has left quite a bit of acrimony between the pair–they actually might have a point.

Read More »

There is a mini-tempest brewing over how shares were tallied in the Yahoo annual meeting last Friday, specifically around whether a group of votes withheld by one of Yahoo’s major shareholders was not counted, counted incorrectly or even voted incorrectly by the investor.

According to sources close to the thinking at Capital Research & Management, the proxy committees for its two large funds that hold a significant stake in Yahoo recommended last week that they withhold votes specifically from CEO Jerry Yang and from various board members, such as Chairman Roy Bostock, to register disappointment with their performance.

Thus, sources said, the investment fund has approached outside vote tabulator Broadridge Financial Solutions, a Lake Success, N.Y.-based financial services company that does securities clearing and processing, about whether those votes were correctly counted.

Read More »

After its annual meeting today, as Yahoo board members had lunch together, Yahoo released the unsurprising results of its shareholder vote and it seems we will still have Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang to kick around some more.

Yang garnered 85.4 percent of the shares to stay on as a director of the Internet company, with 18.2 percent withheld.

While having almost 20 percent of your investors think you are not worthy is not good, it is also not nearly as bad as it could have been.

Read More »

OK, now we’re cooking with gas at Yahoo’s annual meeting in San Jose, as various shareholders–mostly small ones–come to the microphones and give Yahoo a piece of their mind.

First up, longtime Yahoo activist shareholder Eric Jackson asked Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock to step down, noted that Yahoo had overplayed its hand on the Microsoft bid, wondered about Yahoo President Sue Decker’s time problems (too many outside boards) and questioned the worth of Yahoo’s deal to sell an asset in Japan.

Read More »

Talking to Yahoo shareholders as if they were particularly thick and surly teenagers, Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock articulated his umpteenth defense of the board’s handling of its dealmaking with Microsoft.

“I’d like to take you back–with all the hoopla, all the publicity that has surrounded the company, I think there has been a great deal of misinformation,” said Bostock about Yahoo’s dealings with Microsoft over the last year, speaking at its at its annual meeting this morning.

Thanks, Roy–glad you finally cleared things up!

Read More »

Is Microsoft about to make another move on Yahoo? Or perhaps on AOL? Or is it just getting ready to articulate strategic plans for getting serious about the online search business on its own at its financial analysts’ meeting tomorrow morning?

Or perhaps–and this might be the best strategy for the moment–the software giant is actually managing to stifle itself and wait to return to the playing field when things settle down a little bit.

Read More »

Listening to all the birds-on-a-wire chatter about what will happen in the latest round of the never-ending Microsoft-Yahoo saga, it’s still hard to know what to think, given the ever-increasing noise around the proceedings, which will continue until Yahoo’s Aug. 1 shareholder meeting.

Yesterday, it got louder still as Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock and CEO Jerry Yang sent out far and wide yet another stinkbomb letter, calling activist investor Carl Icahn a money-grubbing “corporate agitator.”

Well, yes–not that there’s anything wrong with that!

Read More »

Here is the entire statement from Microsoft, released this afternoon, about its version of the new proposal it made with the help of activist investor Carl Icahn, who is waging a proxy fight against Yahoo.

Read More »

If you want to get to the heart of the truly dysfunctional relationship between Yahoo and Microsoft, consider the alleged 24-hour deadline that Yahoo claimed Microsoft and its sidekick, activist investor Carl Icahn, gave the company to respond to its most recent search proposal.

I say “alleged,” because like in all things related to this takeover mess, the pair disagree on exactly what that meant.

Frankly, it’s enough to make former President Bill Clinton’s definition of what “is” is make sense.

Before we get to this disagreement, here are the terms of the new Microsoft/Icahn joint deal to take control of Yahoo’s seach business, according to numerous sources from both sides.

Read More »

When sources at Microsoft last week told BoomTown that it was going to use Carl Icahn as a kind of messenger for a new ad search proposal, I thought: Uh-oh.

And tonight, like clockwork, Yahoo rejected Microsoft’s latest bid to buy its search and ad search business, which was delivered in conjunction with the billionaire activist investor, who is waging a proxy fight against the company.

Why? Well, it’s kind of like sending Pepé Le Pew to a garden party.

Sources tell me the bid included a $20 billion ad search revenue guarantee over 10 years, as well as other small improvements on Microsoft’s previous proposal.

Still, Yahoo turned up its nose at it.

Read More »