Yahoo Corporate Governance and the Microsoft Takeover We are studying the potential buyout of Yahoo by Microsoft from the perspective of Yahoo’s Board of Directors. Yahoo! Inc. provides Internet services to users, advertisers, publishers and developers worldwide. It offers online properties and services to users; and marketing solutions and tools to advertisers and publishers. For example, Yahoo! Finance is a portal for information on general financial conditions and specific firm information. It is also the second largest internet search engine on the planet, behind Google, which is also their main competitor. Jerry Yang, 39, is Co-Founder, CEO, Chief Yahoo! and Executive Director and Susan L. Decker, 45, is President. Yahoo!, a …show more content…
For the past few years, Microsoft Corporation, the software behemoth located in Redmond Washington, has been looking to acquire Yahoo!, Inc. While Microsoft Corp. has numerous reasons to be interested in acquiring Yahoo!, there are few options available for Yahoo! Inc. Like Google’s purchase of Double-Click in 2007, Microsoft sees Yahoo! as a way to extract internet advertising revenue. Further, Microsoft has for years sought to build a winning portal that could dominate the search engine market, currently dominated by Google. MSN was Microsoft’s version of AOL. Even after years of Research &Development in this area, Microsoft still only has 19% of the internet search engine market (and that’s because of ISP bundling and desktop default presets.) Actual search engine use of MSN is much lower than 19%. Google is a money-maker and has a dominating market share. Beyond the search engine market, there also is that “innovation” nirvana for which Microsoft is always searching. It wasn’t Hotmail, it wasn’t MSN maps, it wasn’t SoapBox, and the list of Microsoft Corp. disappointments goes on. Now they decided to go for a big acquisition. Microsoft’s original unsolicited offer of $44.6 billion for a complete buyout of Yahoo! Was rejected by Yahoo!’s board. Microsoft has continued to revise their bids, increasing it to $47.5B to no avail. This initial bid was $31 per share a 62% premium for
The largest stakeholder of Netscape’s equity was Jim Clark, who accounted for 24%. The other primary owners were the venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, & Byers, a group of six media companies led by Adobe Systems, and Netscape’s president and CEO, James Barksdale. They held 11%, 11%, and 10% of Netscape’s equity, respectively. The ownership shares of Netscape did not correspond to the investments made by the primary owners because the owners made their investments at different times. Jim Clark invested in Netscape first and therefore paid the least amount of money for the largest share of the firm. His second investment came at the same time as Kleiner Perkins, and at that point the price to purchase a share of Netscape had obviously increased. Clark’s total investment amounted to $3.5 million for 24% of the firm, whereas Kleiner Perkins paid $5 million for 11% of the firm. The investment made by the media companies came later, when the price of Netscape had risen even further. Therefore, the media firms purchased an aggregate 11% share of Netscape for $18 million. The final primary owner, Barksdale, was not said to have invested any capital in Netscape. However, as president and CEO, it can be assumed that he was offered a 10% share as an incentive to guide and motivate the company to perform well.
Microsoft has their dominance of the industry at stake. They could potentially come out on top if left to continue their current tactics. They are masterfully “marketing their products” and it is paying off for them (Love, 1997).
They have expand their business from only on computer software and hardware to online search engine, home gaming devices and smartphone, those business are the popular business in the world, Microsoft is trying to adapt the new market.
Over the past few years the economy in the United States has taken a downturn. It has been so bad, that some businesses were not able to survive. However, Microsoft Corporation (Microsoft) was not one of those companies. The fiscal strength of Microsoft played a large part in providing the company with the ability and resources to survive the difficult financial markets (Microsoft Corporation, 2009). As a
Google Company is one of the global leaders in technology and in enabling people access information from the internet through their efficient search engines. Google immediately gained the attention of the internet sector for being a better search engine than its competitors (Wheelen, Hunger, Hoffman, & Bamford, 2015). This was after a tremendous effort in marketing their services and capturing a large market worldwide. However, there being so many risks and challenges in this line of business Google has had the urge to come up with new strategies so that they are able to overcome any challenge before them. The major problem that Google has
Microsoft has been fighting competitors in the Operating System fields as well as the Search field for many years. After Apple launched its new Macintosh computer, Microsoft came out with its first production of Windows which had a graphic user interface. Microsoft had 95% of all OS on individual PC’s in the 2000’s where apple only had about 2%-3% (Rivkin 2). A new venture that Microsoft was working toward was application software where the produced Microsoft Word and Excel. At first these two applications where not very popular on PC computers because WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 where the main applications being run. Microsoft’s solution to this competition was
This essay plans to focus on the corporate strategy of Microsoft, and show how Microsoft has used diversification successfully within their corporate strategy to gain a competitive advantage.
Flickr a popular photo sharing application is a direct competitor to the Google’s Picasa. So, in essence, Yahoo is a multi-market competitor of Google and their competition does not end there. Their tangible and intangible resources are also comparable. For instance, both Yahoo and Google have high powered servers and large data centers that backup and power their various online applications. Both have more than two decades of experience in consumer level applications and services. Both have garnered a strong goodwill and are among the most popular internet companies in the world. Since both of their customers are online and consumers of services such as search engine and emails, their competition would fierce in this respect and would naturally get intense as they release new products to encompass new users in their online ecosystem.
Microsoft Corporation is a public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions. Established on April 4, 1975 to develop
This report is issued in order to inform the public about Microsoft Corporation. We analyzed the profitability and liquidity of this company. In addition, we were able to provide recommendations for investments or credits in Microsoft for the best interest of the public.
Microsoft (MS) is a multinational computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. In the mid 1990’s, Microsoft held the monopoly in the production of Operating Systems (OS) for personal computers (PC). When their monopoly was threatened by Netscape, MS began bundling the Internet Explorer (IE) web browser with Windows, using cross-promotional deals with internet service providers (ISP), and prevented PC makers from customizing the opening screen showing Microsoft. These actions, which some view as illegal and unethical, dissolved any competition, raised the barriers of entry and inhibited
Looking at the sizable market share Microsoft has come to enjoy over the years, a new competitor would face a number of entry barriers before entering this market. Customers are very loyal to the Microsoft brand and would expect any competitor to offer at the very least the same features that Microsoft already has.
Yahoo was an early success due to a combination of factors such as timing, hard work, and a good understanding of Web surfer’s tastes and needs.. In early 1995, Net mania was just flowering. It was a great time to be a young entrepreneur with an Internet idea. Dave Faldo and Jerry Yang saw a consumer need for classifying and differentiating web sights. Resting the urge to automate this process, Yahoo’s founders instead chose to manually perform this search, reviewing and classifying roughly 1000 sights a day. This approach combined with their decision to offer a free service lead to early success.
Yahoo! Inc. is one of the oldest and most well-known Internet content providers. Yahoo! Inc. offers one of the most diverse Internet websites. It is believed that by expanding Yahoo!'s services and expanding broadband access, Yahoo! customers will stay on the website and spend increasing amounts of time and money. Yahoo! Inc's biggest obstacle lies in its competition in the form of
Following the success of Netscape and its web browser, Internet became a resource and communication platform idolized by many IT students in the universities. What started off as a hobby-cum-research[1] work by Jerry Yang (now Chief of Yahoo!) and David Filo (Co-founder of Yahoo!) for their Ph.D. dissertations; has evolved and became an Internet sensation over time. What they did was to compile all their favourite web links to form an online directory for easy navigation in the World Wide Web. The duo’s work immediately garnered a lot of attention from many surfers in the Internet world and before they realized it, Yahoo! became one of the most highly visited websites of all time. The duo saw the