Week in review: Yahoo snubs Microsoft--again
Microsoft and Carl Icahn tag-team on Yahoo, and it seems that just about everyone else got their day in court. Also: earnings season heats up.
Yahoo announced over the weekend that it had
The joint proposal called for Microsoft to buy the search business and Yahoo to swap out its board members for Icahn's dissident slate, who would then have control in running the remainder of Yahoo's businesses.
In rejecting the offer, Yahoo told Microsoft that it was willing to sell the entire company for at least $33 a share and that its board believed such a deal could be negotiated and executed before its annual shareholders meeting on August 1. Yahoo said it also informed the software giant that it remained willing to negotiate an "improved search-only transaction."
This sparked another round of letter writing.
Microsoft jumped into the brawl between Yahoo and Icahn on Monday, issuing a "
In other words, it was Icahn, the other partner in Microsoft's joint proposal, who was asking for all Yahoo board members and top management to resign immediately. But even Icahn, in his
Microsoft also contends that its sweetened offer has been incorrectly portrayed as a "take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum" rather than a "timetable" to push negotiations forward. Yahoo, in its investor presentation, notes that Microsoft gave the company only 24 hours to consider its proposal.
In a
The letter complains that Icahn invested in Yahoo only two months ago, and is just looking for a deal to "
Despite those harsh words, Yahoo may finally be warming up to the idea of a takeover. The letter contained this interesting passage: "First, we will sell the entire company to Microsoft for $33 per share or more, if Microsoft will negotiate a transaction that delivers certainty of value and certainty of closing."
In the meantime, Icahn is turning his focus on the proxy battle in which he seeks control of the Yahoo board and will
Yahoo's nine current board members are up for re-election to a one-year term. Icahn's goal is to ensure that the next time Microsoft, or any other suitor, comes a-calling that the path to a buyout will face far fewer potholes.
On tech's court docket
The courts were busy this week with tech issues, the most prominent of which led to a ruling that eBay
The debate centers on whether the product manufacturer or the auction site should bear the cost of policing eBay listings for fakes. For its part, eBay says it spends $5 million a year in maintaining its fraud search engine, which has 13,000 rules that are designed to identify counterfeit listings based on words such as "replica" or "knock-off." Listings flagged by the search engine are manually reviewed by customer service representatives.
Meanwhile, Europe's governing body is
In addition, Intel is charged with paying a "leading original equipment manufacturer" to delay the launch of a product with an AMD central processing unit, and giving "substantial" rebates to the same OEM if it bought only CPUs from Intel.
Microsoft's latest legal headache is a suit from a little-known company called Gotuit Media, which charges that
Gotuit may be a relative unknown, but Microsoft is facing an opponent it knows quite well. Gotuit is represented by San Francisco-based lawyer Spencer Hosie, the same Hosie that successfully represented Burst.com in its suit against Microsoft.
At least two companies in the legal spotlight managed to broker a compromise. YouTube will be
"Viacom and the other litigants have backed off their demand for YouTube user-viewing histories," Google said in a statement. "We have reached agreement to anonymize the data."
The move comes after a federal court earlier this month
While it's not a surprise that Apple is suing Pystar, the big shocker is that it took the Mac pioneer so long to sue; Psystar has been selling a desktop computer running Apple's Mac OS since April.
Apple harvest
Things have certainly been looking up lately for Apple, which announces its earnings next week. While Windows still dominates the computer market,
Just released second-quarter market share figures from Gartner show Apple shipments up 38 percent, to 8.5 percent of all units shipped, up from 6.4 percent a year ago. IDC had Apple's gains somewhat lower, at a 7.8 percent share, up from 6.2 percent a year earlier, but the trend is the same.
And then there's the iPhone. Despite the outages, shortages, and related hand-wringing associated with last Friday's iPhone 3G launch and Thursday's release of the iPhone 2.0 firmware, Apple says there were
iPhones are selling so well, in fact, that
Since AT&T doesn't have any in stock, its individual stores are taking "direct fulfillment" orders, which means that customers can put in an order, pay for a phone, and be contacted when it arrives. Most of the 50 stores said that process is running between 10 and 21 days.
Earn or burn
Earnings season is upon us again, and the big news came from Advanced Micro Devices CEO Hector Ruiz, who announced that he was
The leadership change was announced along with the release of AMD's second-quarter earnings and news that it is getting out of the handheld and digital-television businesses. As has been the case for the last several quarters,
For Google, apparently, a 35 percent year-over-year increase wasn't good enough for shareholders. Google reported net income of $1.25 billion, but earnings per share, excluding various items, were $4.63 per share, short of the $4.74 expected by analysts.
In after-hours trading, the
Another victim of expectations was Microsoft, which saw stronger sales of Windows last quarter. But
The situationlooked a lot better over at Intel and IBM.
Big Blue, meanwhile, reported that its revenue climbed 13 percent year over year, to $26.8 billion. CEO Sam Palmisano called the quarter "outstanding," demonstrating that IBM's diversified product portfolio can sell in both established and emerging markets.
Annex Research financial analyst and IBM tracker Bob Djurdjevic followed, noting that IBM's quarter allays concerns that the IT sector will follow the poor stock performance of financial stocks: "Big Blue is firing on all cylinders. Wall Street doomsayers and recession buzzards had better look for trouble outside the IT industry."
Also of note
Microsoft