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Bill Miller, a behind-the-scenes player in Microsoft-Yahoo talks, may have had a hand in the collapse of the deal.
Original post by Kevin Kelleher, Portfolio.com and software by Elliott Back
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No Microhoo? Shareholders of Yahoo are clearly unhappy.
Shares of Yahoo fell as much as 19 percent in early trading Monday, to a little more than $23, although still above the level they were at before Microsoft disclosed its $31-per-share offer on January 31.
“The only question is whether this is really the bottom,” says Eric Savitz on the Tech Trader Daily blog.
In lowering his rating on Yahoo shares to “sell,” Mark Mahaney, an analyst at Citigroup, wonders why a deal was not forged. Noting that a price of $35-per-share (the midpoint between $33 and $37) amounted to only $3 billion, or 7 percent of the initial bid, “it’s surprising that a 7 percent solution couldn’t be found.”
Henry Blodget on Silicon Alley Insider, says, “Despite Yahoo’s suggestion to the contrary, we have yet to hear from a single Yahoo shareholder who publicly supports Yahoo’s board’s decision to hold fast at $37.”
Yahoo shares have not been at $37 since January 2006.
Kara Swisher on All Things Digital says that some top Yahoo executives are also dismayed that merger discussions collapsed over the weekend.
In particular, the description in the New York Times that some Yahoo executives “were high-fiving each other for defeating Microsoft’s bid,” caused consternation.
“That was very telling, if it was true,” one executive told Swisher. “It shows a complete lack of connection to the balance of the company.”
The proposed merger had drawn its share of critics, who charged that integration and cultural issues would outweigh potential benefits from combining the two. But now that the deal won’t happen, the outlook for both companies is as dire as it was three months ago, before the merger was proposed.
“Without Yahoo, Microsoft has no compelling means of becoming the No. 2 player in online advertising,” said Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst at Collins Stewart. “And without Microsoft, Yahoo has no magic wand to lift its stock back above the mid-20s.”
This much is certain: Yahoo’s stock will take a hard tumble this week as arbitrageurs and others counting on a Microsoft buyout relinquish their shares at a steep discount to last week’s levels. “The word crater comes to mind,” said Rob Enderle, president of tech advisory firm Enderle Group.
Yahoo had already been facing at least one shareholder lawsuit after it refused to accept Microsoft’s proposal. It’s likely to face more lawsuits, as well as other pressure from activist investors.
One of them, Eric Jackson of Ironfire Capital, is urging Yahoo shareholders to vote against all of the company’s board members when they are up for election later this year. Jackson says that he’s started hearing from more Yahoo shareholders since Microsoft dropped its bid.
“They’re surprised and extremely frustrated,” Jackson said. “They were certain a friendly deal was going to happen.”
To appease those shareholders, Yahoo needs to improve its financial performance dramatically. The company unveiled a plan in March showing how a new search technology and an open-source approach to software development would help boost its revenue and cash flow. But analysts and investors have signaled that they aren’t impressed.
The best short-term hope for Yahoo to increase its cash flow is to ally itself with the very company that has put it in dire straits—Google. Yahoo and Google may enter into a limited ad partnership that will run Google ads on keywords where Yahoo makes less money.
That could help bring Yahoo new revenue in coming quarters. But it could also drive away advertisers who are on Yahoo precisely because its search engine, which is significantly less popular than Google’s, charges less for keywords.
Shares of Microsoft are up nearly 3 percent today, and its stock will likely fare much better in the near term. But longer-term threats to its profit growth remain. Vista software sales are slowing; Apple is gaining market share in desktops and laptops; and Google is pushing free versions of office-productivity software, threatening Microsoft Office’s cash cow.
Microsoft has invested heavily in online advertising, only to see its share of the search market—like Yahoo’s—decline steadily. The division that includes Microsoft’s online-ad business has posted steadily growing operating losses for nine straight quarters. In aggregate, it’s racked up $1.7 billion in losses since early 2006.
Such pressures drove Microsoft to pursue Yahoo. The $31-a-share bid that Microsoft made in February offered a 62 percent premium over Yahoo’s stock price at the time. But it also discounted 32 percent off the $41-a-share bid that Microsoft had previously made for Yahoo, a bid that was also rebuffed by Yahoo’s board.
Last week, Microsoft raised its offer to $33 a share, but Yahoo’s board held out for $37.
“I think Yahoo misread Microsoft,” said Enderle. “People usually bid low and then raise their bids. But Microsoft didn’t want talks to drag on, so its strategy was to get the deal done as quickly as possible.” Yahoo, however, sensed that protracted talks could strengthen its hand, and so it held firm to a higher bid. “Yahoo thought Microsoft was lowballing it,” Enderle said, “and they missed the boat.”
So, like Yahoo, Microsoft must now scramble. Ballmer has outlined other possible acquisitions it could make if the Yahoo deal fell through: Facebook, Time Warner’s AOL, and News Corp.’s MySpace. Facebook is also determined to remain independent, while AOL has talked with Yahoo about a deal. That leaves MySpace as the easiest partner for Microsoft.
Or Microsoft could simply bide its time and come back to Yahoo after its shareholders start screaming. In doing so, it would follow Larry Ellison’s playbook in Oracle’s acquisition of BEA Systems. Oracle walked away from BEA after its bid was rejected, then talked a lot about how hard it pushed for its bid. Once BEA investors complained, Oracle bought BEA at a lower price.
“Microsoft can come back again,” said Aggarwal, “especially if Yahoo doesn’t do very well on its own.”
Original post by Kevin Kelleher, Portfolio.com and software by Elliott Back
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Original post by Associated Press and software by Elliott Back
Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor helped you find a job, and helped ease you into middle age. Now he wants to help you build the last web page you’ll ever need.
Tributes.com is scheduled for a soft launch in June. It aims to provide a central location to house online memorials for those who have passed on. It’s starting with $4.3 million in funding, with The Wall Street Journal as a lead investor.
Taylor, who retired from Monster.com in 2005, says Monster was intended to take the jobs section of newspaper’s classified ads online. So online obituaries seemed like an inevitable next step.
“I’m extremely bullish about this business — it’s not a question of if it will explode, but when,” says Taylor, who spun the business off his baby boomer social networking site Eons.com. “I’ve watched and built a career on migrating the whole newspaper to the web, and the obituary section is the laggard category.”
The site comes as the funeral industry is learning to target the public’s desire to grieve online for the dearly departed. On social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, online memorials are springing up organically to give friends, family members and strangers a place to mourn, and even small, family-owned funeral homes have begin offering web-based memorials for their customers.
The site sets itself apart from other memorial sites like SweetMemoriesSite.com, ChristianMemorials.com and PreciousMemoriesAndMore.com in two ways. First, people can find information on those who’ve died with a name search from a database that includes the entire Social Security Death Index since 1936. And second, the site plans to market more to the funeral industry than other sites, where individuals pay for tributes.
Tributes will allow people to verify deaths, get memorial service information, and leave tributes and messages — the first such site that works by searching on an individual’s name.
“Until Tributes, people had to have very specific information — where their friends died and what funeral home handled the services — to find out what happened and leave memorials,” said John Heald, a funeral director who is working with Tributes.com. “We are building a channel to the funeral industry to build our site with them, so we can be an aggregator for all the obituaries.”
Tributes plans to sell its service to funeral homes that will then package an online tribute with the other services offered to the bereaved. Obits will stay up indefinitely, while condolences may come down after five to 10 years.
“We need to learn from MySpace. For example, when a teenager dies there are thousands of condolences,” Heald says. “It’s a new, important, effective way of grieving.”
The death-care industry is ready to embrace an idea like Tributes.com, says Robin Heppell, who coaches funeral directors on how to use the web to promote their business and to make their services more valuable.
“People who spend the winter in Florida log on to faraway websites during the winter to check to see who died back home,” the Vancouver-based funeral director and consultant says. “Most funeral homes have websites now, and those that don’t are looking at setting up.”
Mortuaries with well-established websites, like Pellerin Funeral Home in Louisiana and Haskett Funeral Homes in Canada, say the amount of traffic they get, and the way the websites are used, surprise even them. Both family-owned businesses have learned to upload video tributes to their sites, and keep a condolence page open to collect messages long after the funerals.
“I have friends who check the website every day to see who’s died, and our parish sheriff leaves a tribute for every one,” says Debbie Gauthier, who manages the Pellerin website. “We know it’s one of the best things we can do for the family — the tributes and condolences are comforting to people long after the funeral has ended.”
There’s definitely a hunger for online memorials. The Pellerin website includes a longstanding video tribute to Pope John Paul, who died in April 2005, that still gathers many hits a day. “You can watch that one forever, we won’t be taking it down,” Gauthier says.
And Heppell points to the memorial page on Facebook for Stefanie Rengel, a 14-year-old Toronto girl murdered in January. “Ten thousand people offered condolences, memories and comfort,” Heppell says.
The industry is already learning that a decedent’s self-created MySpace or Facebook profile can be jarring for the families of the recently deceased. Heppell advised funeral homes to “have one of the deceased friends look at their page first, because there can be suggestive photos and explicit language that the families aren’t ready to deal with.”
Taylor, who left Monster.com in 2005 to launch Eons.com, a website popular with aging baby boomers, started his newest venture after noticing that there was no central repository for online memorials where one could grieve and remember — and verify the loss of — a loved one.
He spun Tributes off Eons as a separate entity, and sought investors to give Tributes five to 10 years to take off.
“Jeff always had his eye on Monster’s obits, and he noticed the obits weren’t getting any traction for getting online, even when every other section of a traditional newspaper had made the transition,” Haney says. “When he evolved a strategy for Eons as a lifestyle brand for boomers, he saw that the grieving groups are very popular at Eons.”
By harvesting the U.S. Death Index, Tributes will automatically have a listing for everyone who dies, or who has died since 1936.
The website also plans to offer round-the-clock grief support groups.
“Traditional support groups that meet once a week aren’t as valuable to members as the 24/7 online groups,” Haney says.
Original post by Marty Graham and software by Elliott Back