"Secondly Icahn and his would-be board do not have the experience either to restructure a high-technology company in a fast-changing environment."

And the current board of Yahoo! Do????

Paris: because she could do a better job than the current board.

"Icahn, we are told, has created an impossible situation for himself - he has no leverage with which to negotiate a decent deal with Microsoft because he has no other plan for the company"

Hmmm? Is that a Naked Short Sell, and much frowned upon in Markets .... http://www.sec.gov/rules/other/2008/34-58166.pdf ?

It's bad, the more Microsoft and Icahn try to talk and sue and burn the company, the more you drop the price, the more you reward them for trying to talk down the company.

$40 is fine. End of story.

If MS don't want to pay they can launch a hostile takeover and pay the price that way instead.

For the Yahoo board to claim Ichan's board lacks the expertise to run Yahoo is a joke. Yahoo's present board has already proved it can't run yahoo properly, which is why Google has been eating its lunch.

...which is what?

Is directly the result of the present Management & Board's policies which is why the price is heading back to its pre-Microsoft offer level of $20. Since the share price was on a downward slope towards the teens prior to the Microsoft offer, you can bet the present Management & Board's policies will keep it on that trend.

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=YHOO#symbol=YHOO;range=1y

The fact that MS wants to buy the company tells me they are doing something right. You can crticize all you want, but their company is worth $20-30 a share with some very large market capitalization. They also have one of the more repsected brands on the internet, one of the major search engines, and is a home page for millions. (myself inlcuded).

They also have some assets that are valuable gems too (flickr).

Not to mention (which no one really does) the potentially billions of dollars of Intellectual property that this company owns. Don't you think they patented a few things over the last 2 decades, as they were one of the earliest companies to be building datacenters, and running a ecommerce site? It is this brand and IP portfolio that M$ is after so hungry. I am amazed this kind of BS tactics is accepted in the markets - pay up or shutup, you should not be able to 'barter" a competitor into a disadvantaged market position.

The merger of Micro$oft & Yahoo! makes as much sense as Ford merging with Blackstone, or Coca-Cola merging with Heinz. This is a Carpetbagger takeover, neither Micro$oft or Yahoo! (& their shareholders) will benefit, except from Mr Icahn.

To he honest... Ichan't see any difference between Ichan's letter and this one. Perhaps Ichan't do without caffine today?

Okay, okay... coat->door->taxi->

Well... it's hard to knock those bullet points. Selling out is good for the owners, when the offer's right, but it's not always good for the company, and when the buyer is Microsoft it never seems to be good for the end users. (Well, that's my opinion, yours may vary.)

"Microsoft can’t decide what is and isn’t strategically important..."

You could probably stop right there, it seems to me. MS has enough power and money to "choose poorly" and still get away with it, many many times. Just give away the product, "integrate" it with Win/Office, and/or buy out the competition. When you have these options, strategy is sort of irrelevant. But I'd hate to depend on Microsoft for my internet searches, or as my primary web portal, or as my only secure login provider, or... nightmare scenarios all.

Depressing just to think about it.

Yahoo's value to MS has been eroding. MS is not willing to pay as much for Yahoo now as it would have in March or so.

Why? Ballmer saw that (MS+YHOO marketshare)>Google and wanted to acquire YHOO to be (temprorarily) bigger than Google, or maybe make a last effort to dominate. Since then both MS and YHOO have lost market share and Google has gained market share. That means that the above formula no longer work.

MS is not "flip-flopping". They realise that the window of opportunity is rapidly narrowing and thus are prepared to offer less and less as time goes on.

As above (see the title)

Please do a simple web search before posting...

Yahoo own the following well known services:

Yahoo Mail

Yahoo Groups

Yahoo News

Geocities

Flickr

del.icio.us

And that's ignoring the lesser known services.

Full list is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Yahoo!-owned_sites_and_services

"which is why Google has been eating its lunch."

Don't get me wrong, I can't stand Yahoo, I really dislike them and I prefer Google in every way. But apart from search and advertising, yahoo beat google in pretty much every area (except amongst geeks).

Should add Yahoo messenger to that above list because at least in the shipping industry yahoo is the industry standard. Fortunately for Google, search and advertsing are massively more important then anything else at the moment