Yahoo’s board keeps delivering shock after shock. Not long after sacking CEO Carol Bartz over the phone, Roy Bostock, the president of the board, announced that the company is available for sale.
In 2008, Microsoft made an offer of $44 billion, but the deal did not go through. It would not be wrong to state now that Yahoo! regrets that decision. As a spokesperson of Yahoo! declared now, “Yahoo is open to selling itself to the right bidder.” The question is: would Microsoft still be interested in acquiring Yahoo? And if not, who will be the lucky winner.
The Wall Street Journal found out from the same spokesperson that the board jumped to the conclusion that Carol Bartz did an unsatisfactory job after analyzing the company’s assets over a period of two weeks. Not to say that they were wrong, but Carol Bartz has been the CEO of Yahoo! for over two years, so the board should have drown this conclusion way earlier. In fact, most people who had an idea about what Yahoo! is could tell that the company is not heading in the right direction with Bartz at the wheel. The board noticed that sacking Bartz was the right thing to do, as the Yahoo! shares started going up right after this event.
However, the board of directors simply does not want anymore to find a new leader with a vision that could save the company. Instead, they decided to offer Yahoo! for sale, hoping that the company that will buy it knows what to do with it. The main focus should be on content, media and communications, which are and hopefully will remain the strong points of this company.
With several hundred million users out there, Yahoo! is still a big player, so whoever buys it will increase its market share considerably. However, to take advantage of this great number of users, the new owner of Yahoo! would have to invest heavily in the areas mentioned above. We can do nothing but wait and see how things go for this company and who is interested in buying it. This auction is certainly worth keeping an eye on.
