Earlier today, BoomTown reported that Yahoo was poised to name a few new top execs at its Silicon Valley HQ.
But the company has also hired a new director of public affairs in the nation’s capital–Amber Allman of 463 Communications.
With a spate of regulatory issues coming up around its pending search and online advertising deal with Microsoft, Yahoo will need all the help it can get.
Carl Icahn, the activist billionaire investor who made such a noisy fuss in his quest to force management and other changes at Yahoo, is taking a much quieter leave from the Internet giant’s board.
He said “there was not a need at this time for an activist investor” on Yahoo’s board.
That’s true, of course, but here’s BoomTown’s quickie analysis: Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz completely ignores him.
As BoomTown reported earlier today, Yahoo and Microsoft have struck a search and online advertising partnership that sources said will be announced tomorrow.
But it is eminently instructive to look at the deal that Microsoft had offered Yahoo almost exactly a year ago, which was rejected by Yahoo in favor of a competing bid by Google.
The Yahoogle deal, of course, failed, after regulators looked askance at a partnership of the No. 1 and No. 2 search players.
The new deal between Yahoo and Microsoft, according to sources, certainly seems a lot smaller than the one offered last June, although there might be a surprise yet to come.
BoomTown once asked Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer if the software giant was ever going to be able to catch No. 1 Google in market share in the increasingly lucrative search arena–despite years of trying and billions in investment in its Web businesses overall.
“We don’t actually have to catch the leader,” answered the pugnacious tech leader. “We just have to surpass the No. 2 to have a great business.”
No. 2 is Yahoo. And now, with a recently revamped search offering called Bing showing some promising signs, Ballmer shot another one across its bow by telling an audience yesterday that he was ready to spend billions more to win the race.
Recently–in the echo chamber that is Silicon Valley–several people told BoomTown quite separately that former Yahoo President Sue Decker had become an executive-in-residence at the Blackstone Group.
Actually, when reached via email, Decker told me she has yet to decide her next step after leaving Yahoo and had simply set up a no-strings-attached desk at the private equity firm’s San Francisco office, but is definitely not an EIR there.
And who says bloggers don’t check?
In fact, a move to join Blackstone formally would have been very ironic for Decker given that the firm–specifically, longtime friend and former colleague, Jill Greenthal–was one of the advisers to Microsoft in its failed takeover battle for Yahoo.
Was it more than a month ago that the Google was rumored to be in “late-stage negotiations to acquire Twitter”?
Not so much late-stage, I guess. So, I guess it should come as no surprise that it was time to fob yet another rumor that yet another moneybags of a company–this time, Apple–is in “late-stage negotiations to buy Twitter.”
But despite very serious interest in the hot microblogging service by every company that can afford considering such a thing, including Apple, getting across that late-stage line would require major investors in the hot start-up to be very involved, and they are not as yet.
So, rather than be on the edge of your seat about all these endless, alleged late-stage high jinks, here is a five-step list to cut out and keep when the questionable rumors of “late-stage negotiations” with Microsoft, News Corp., Verizon, Cisco and more inevitably show up.
Here’s an interesting irony–Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz will have her 99th day in office on the very one that the Internet giant will announce its first-quarter earnings: April 21, 2009 at 2 p.m. PST.
Technically, it will mean that she has been running Yahoo for 100 days, a time when most administrations get their first evaluation.
Thus, if it’s good enough for President Obama, it’s good enough for Bartz!
While most expect the results for the quarter to be weak, due to the econalypse, the overall verdict from BoomTown’s needling of Yahoos to give me info on their new leader recently: Love, love, love Bartz’s innate decisiveness, and wanting more of the same.
Jill Nash, Yahoo’s chief communications officer, has told CEO Carol Bartz and other Yahoo staff this afternoon that she is leaving the company.
Nash, sources said, told staff that she does not have any plans to move to another company immediately, so the reasons for her departure are unclear.
BoomTown would have to guess that Nash is simply completely spent from her past two years at Yahoo, which have been very fraught from a public relations perspective, to say the least.
It was exactly one year ago today that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called Yahoo co-founder and then-CEO Jerry Yang and told him he was going to make an unwelcome public bid to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion, or $31 a share, in order to turbocharge Microsoft’s Internet business.
Today, Yahoo shares are hovering at about $12 a share, with the company’s valuation at about $16.3 billion–and Microsoft is still in need of a jump.
I think that just about sums it up!
But if not, here are 10 BoomTown posts over the last year about the pair’s epic failure, oops, fight, you can peruse to take a trip down memory lane.
At least Yahoo got one day of stock euphoria, on the news that its CEO Jerry Yang was stepping down, before Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer dropped yet another bomb on the troubled Internet giant by saying once more with feeling that he is not at all interested in buying it.
Yahoo shares plummeted on the news, dropping below $10 a share to close at $9.14, down $2.41 or an astonishing 21 percent.
While lack of interest in acquiring Yahoo is a sentiment that Ballmer has expressed more times than Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said “maverick” in the presidential campaign, Wall Street continues to hold out hope that Microsoft might swoop in and make a new bid for all of Yahoo.
It will not. Let’s repeat. It. Will. Not.
Well, for sure, Microsoft execs were not doing high-fives after Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang said he was stepping down yesterday, as Yahoo execs reportedly did after the software giant abandoned its takeover bid for the Internet giant earlier this year.
Well, maybe some small and discreet ones.
And while Microsoft will not be making a renewed offer for the company now that Yang will be going, execs for the software giant were burning up the phone wires down to Silicon Valley yesterday trying to make sure it is well positioned to make the deal it does want: A sweeping search partnership with Yahoo to help battle Google.
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.
Another week, another nonpick for the still-outstanding position to lead Microsoft’s digital business.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has cast about for more than three months, both internally and externally, for the person who will turbocharge Microsoft’s Web efforts, but no one has emerged a favorite.
Nonetheless, new prospects include former Cisco exec and current Joost CEO Mike Volpi, sources said.
When reports came out last week that Google and Yahoo were downsizing their controversial search advertising deal, I told a Yahoo exec I happened to be having dinner with that that it was the surest sign that the search giant was about to dump the long-suffering Internet portal.
The exec, who made the case that the deal was always tactical and not strategic, laughed. For all its problems, Yahoo has always been a straight-up player and such sneaky machinations are not its strong suit.
Google, not so much.
BoomTown was a squeaky enough wheel to get Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang to grant a long interview by phone yesterday–just a day after he had announced weak third-quarter earnings results for the Internet giant, caught as others are in the econalypse, as well as layoffs of at least 10 percent of its global work force.
But instead of being glum, as you might expect, especially after a year of corporate turmoil that would have finally gotten to even Job, Yang sounded surprisingly confident that Yahoo would emerge a winner after all the wrenching change is wrought at the company he co-founded.
Here is the first of two parts.
Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
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