Hiding A Hatred of Microsoft?
And the Truth Comes Out...
Sadly for Jerry Yang, psychic phenomena don’t carry a whole lot of weight in today’s corporate-governance regime.
Mr.Yang will have to keep that in mind as he and Yahoo defend the drafting of a press release in October to reject a Microsoft bid. For those not handy with calendars, that was three months before Microsoft actually got around to bidding. Now, Yahoo did have expressions of interest from Microsoft earlier that year, and indeed as long ago as March 2000 Microsoft was seen as “the most likely contender” to take over Yahoo after the then-terrifying AOL-Time Warner merger. But in October, there was no bid to reject. Yahoo just knew it didn’t want Microsoft.
Outraged activist Carl Icahn called Yang out Tuesday for having a “deep hostility” toward Microsoft. Yang denies this, but the denials ring hollow. (And not just because one of Yang’s nicknames within his company is “Grumpy.”)
But why hide a hatred of Microsoft? If anything, it would at least provide some kind of explanation for the otherwise knee-jerk rejection of a bid that didn’t yet exist. Besides, most of Silicon Valley’s old-line companies hate Microsoft–a legacy of Microsoft’s systematic destruction of Valley golden child Netscape (the subject of the U.S.’s antitrust crusade against Microsoft in the 1990s). Netscape was Yahoo’s buddy. Another Yahoo buddy, Google, doesn’t hide its disdain for Microsoft. Larry Page said a couple of weeks ago that Microsoft “has a history of doing bad stuff.”
Now no one is going to make an argument that Microsoft is pure of heart. After all, the company recently accepted faulty chips from Intel to help Intel make their earnings. But there is a big pot-and-kettle issue here with both Google and Yahoo. Critics see Google as having its own plans for world domination and, despite the quippy “Don’t Be Evil” motto, bemoan the Web search and ad giant’s amassing the personal information of its users on what may be the largest scale outside the government. As for Yahoo, there was that whole incident about helping China convict a dissident journalist, presumably to protect Yahoo’s business standing in that country.
But the larger point is this: It isn’t 1999 any more. The tech world is supposed to have matured, and the petty childhood rivalries forged in the heady spells of the tech boom don’t hold up in a world where time has revealed the strains of expansion on these companies and future growth no longer is assured. The past is past. The future is now.
By: Heidi Moore
Wall Street Journal; June 4, 2008
