Jerry Yang, the chief executive of Yahoo, was finishing a regularly scheduled company board meeting Thursday night when his assistant interrupted him with an urgent phone call. It was Steven A. Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, and his message was curt. He did not call to negotiate. Microsoft would make public a hostile $44.6 billion offer for Yahoo early Friday morning in a bold move to counter Google’s online pre-eminence.
Mr. Yang, in shock, rushed back with the news to his directors, some of whom were getting ready to leave Yahoo’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. The board meeting was no longer over; it would turn into a strategy session that stretched into the night.
The message that jolted Mr. Yang and his directors also jolted the technology industry. The industry has seen its share of take over in past several years after the DOT COM bust. Some of the hostile take overs were from Oracle. Most of those take overs were expected or even sought after for the competitive advantage. For example, the Oracle takeover of both PeopleSoft and BEA Systems are seen purely as consolidation for efficiency and competitiveness. These were not seen as a strategy shift for Oracle. However, the Microsoft’s bid is a strategy shit from the virtues that Microsoft operated.
Is this shift in Microsoft strategy or a desperate move by Steve Ballmer to keep the company afloat in this changing world? After dismal performance of Vista that supposed to be Microsoft’s best foot forward in the 21th century, Microsoft has been burning cash in many failed products (to name a few: Zune, Xbox, MSN) and without any new products in sight. This lack of company direction and lack of success in investment are already reflected in the company price. The return on investment on Microsoft has been dismal.
As competition from Linux and Apple grew on the operating system sector, Microsoft has only product that can be categorized as ‘cash cow’, Microsoft Office Productivity Suite. All other products are blotted and badly engineered. One product that Microsoft spent billions of dollars defending is the Internet Explorer. The IE has been losing market share. So, why did Microsoft spent so much money defending it in courts? Besides, European court has ruled against Microsoft. May be Microsoft is better off spinning off companies rather than taking over Yahoo.
On the other hand, the industry expected that Yahoo to either clean up its act or be taken over. Yahoo has squandered so much cash it had in many ventures that it has either no experience or not its core business. Yahoo, just like Google, is primarily an internet advertising agency. Yahoo can diversify by taking on other industries but first and foremost they have to focus on their core business (internet advertising).