Week in review: Yahoo snubs Microsoft
Yahoo thinks it's worth more, Danger is a buy, and BlackBerry is temporarily bye-bye. Also: Spying immunity for telcos.
But it appears that the companies' buyout battle has only begun.
In an announcement that had been expected, Yahoo's board of directors rejected Microsoft's $44 billion takeover offer, saying it undervalues the company. Yahoo said its board will continue to evaluate its strategic options and pursue a path to "maximize value for all stockholders."
Microsoft now has two paths it can take to buy Yahoo, according to some analysts, investors, and proxy solicitors. The software giant can up the ante on its initial buyout bid of $44.6 billion and hope that Yahoo will bite, or try the one-two punch approach of a tender offer followed by a proxy fight for control of Yahoo's board of directors.
While analysts believe that the company has a few other moves up its sleeve before it submits its best and final offer, Microsoft appears to be posturing for a fight. Some have said the company is likely willing to up its bid from $31 to at least $35 a share.
Yahoo shareholders could try to intervene, creating a situation similar to the one BEA Systems faced last year, to negotiate a deal. Absent a higher bid, Microsoft is likely to deliver that one-two punch, some proxy solicitors say. Yahoo's entire 10-member board is up for re-election at the next annual shareholders meeting.
The idea of an increased bid sounds good to Yahoo's second-largest shareholder, who said Microsoft will need to
That judgment was included in the latest Legg Mason Value Trust newsletter by Bill Miller, the chief investment officer of Legg Mason Capital Management, which holds more than 80 million Yahoo shares.
However, Yahoo continues to look for alternatives. According to a source familiar with the matter, News Corp. and Yahoo have been in talks about
Many CNET News.com readers believe that Yahoo is just delaying the inevitable, and one reader says Yahoo employees aren't happy about it.
"The smell of fear and rage is pervasive on campus," wrote one News.com reader to the TalkBack forum. "They might as well have been told the Mansons were buying the place."
Additionally, Yahoo
However, sources inside the Internet company
Plugged in and disconnected
Yahoo isn't the only company on Microsoft's shopping list this week. The
Danger's Sidekick handles many of the same functions that business-oriented smartphones handle--Web browsing, e-mail, and instant messaging--but it does so in a way that has been more popular with executives' kids than with businesspeople themselves.
The challenge for Microsoft, though, is that Danger has its own operating system, distinct from Windows Mobile, as well as a completely different way of doing business than Microsoft.
Meanwhile, Monday's widespread BlackBerry outage--the second major one in the past 12 months--left Research In Motion customers
Representatives of AT&T and Verizon Wireless told several media outlets that, from what they understood, all wireless carriers in North America that work with RIM were affected. The last time an outage of this magnitude occurred, in April, RIM blamed a database problem that snowballed when the backup "failover" process didn't work as planned.
In another disconnect--this one planned--
Under the earlier plan with T-Mobile, Starbucks customers needed a paid subscription to access the in-store Wi-Fi service, and T-Mobile HotSpot subscribers will continue to have access to Starbucks Wi-Fi, thanks to an agreement between AT&T and T-Mobile.
But the new AT&T plan gives all customers two free hours per day, with a $3.99 fee for additional two-hour chunks of time. Monthly subscriptions will cost $19.99 and will enable access to other AT&T hot-spot locations in addition to Starbucks. AT&T broadband customers also will be able to surf at the more than 7,000 Starbucks locations in the U.S. for free.
The spotlight was also on mobile broadband gear, services, software, and strategies at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Read CNET's full coverage here.
Politicians on the line
In a setback for privacy and civil-liberties groups, the U.S. Senate
By a 31-to-67 vote, senators failed to approve a Democrat-sponsored amendment that would have allowed lawsuits to continue against AT&T and other telecommunication companies accused of illegal activities.
Because the broader bill being considered currently includes retroactive immunity for those companies--something that President Bush
By a 191-to-229 vote, the House failed to approve a bill to extend the Protect America Act for 21 days in its current form. The law--which Republicans say is necessary to allow interception of communications--is scheduled to expire on Saturday.
The vote came hours after
The debate goes back to a New York Times report in late 2005 that the president had authorized the National Security Agency to conduct wiretaps, allegedly involving Americans' conversations and Internet communications, without a court order. The news ultimately led to proposed changes to a 1978 law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.
Meanwhile, Comcast, AT&T, and other network operators would be expected to
The new bill is an apparent effort to be less prescriptive than previous efforts, which failed in a Republican-dominated Congress two years ago. The modified approach is an apparent attempt to address the howls of protest from network operators, who have argued that previous Net neutrality bills in Congress amount to unnecessary Internet regulations.
Also of note
Microsoft made its leadership changes official,