Lame letter. The tone is really personal and unprofessional, IMO. It's all about Jerry's ego at this point. Someone needs to pull his chain. Bostock is useless; he's seems to be Jerry's lapdog.

Jerry's right to hold out for more but he's going about it the wrong way. Microsoft would probably throw him a few bucks a share to save face in private discussions but this sort of public letter is just going to piss Microsoft off.

Basically same as always: Jerry's a nice guy with good intentions who has no idea how to run a business.

Well the press release and the tone are both aweful. You are right.

Well I find it pathetic how both sides behave. I mean $42.25 billion, come on, that's a whole lot of money...

Maybe I will get tarred & feathered, but in my eyes Yahoo! is really a lame search engine / search directory, whatever you like to call.

I trued to search some articles with it and I had not the same quality as some well-known competitor.

If I were Microsoft, I would create a secret team, hire the 50 best computer programmers in the world, and shower 'em with money, cars, whatever it takes, and rebuild an engine from scratch. Why not use the $42.25 billion to get a top team and programm the best engine. Instead of trying to catch up with a second best engine, and having to reprogramm the whole thing...

As a short term strategy it would be okay to buy Yahoo! But in the long term. I dunno...

I'm still hoping Microsoft just walks away from this so Yahoo can die alone. By next year Yahoo will be nothing more than a domain scalpers placeholder.

MSFT needs Yahoo. They can't get the necessary search volume without Yahoo (heck, they might have a better search engine than both Google and Yahoo today, but no one will ever know without the necessary volume). Plus Yahoo is the leader in display ads. MSFT needs Yahoo and needs to do something quickly.

And there is nothing wrong with Jerry's response. If Steve wanted to make things ugly by going public with a saber rattling message, then hats off to Jerry for responding with a very factual and professional "letter" back. Jerry is basically telling Steve to man up and stop trying to play this out in the press. Nothing wrong with that.

@sonofapitch: They don't need Yahoo. Yahoo would be really useful for Microsoft if they want a better web prescence, but if they're happy making their money on Windows and Office, Yahoo would just distract them from fixing Vista.

This Jerry dude's emo.

Jerry is going to get hung on that response mark my words.

My advice to Jerry Take the money and retire ;)
Yahoo shareholders will be happy if they sell out now rather then delay and wait for the stock to go down and then have someone else buy them out dirt cheap.

maybe Jerry wants ballmer to throw in a few license copied of vista and a couple of xbox's to get better shareholder value for the deal ;)

Every time I've decided to write a letter like that, I've ended up regretting it. You never, ever win responding to pissy douchebaggery with more pissy douchebaggery.

And what I mean by that is Jerry sure sounds like a pissy douchebag, in case you were wondering.

Idiots regret.

Here is a true story... I once foresaw in a dream that Microsoft was planning to build a new office building in Cologne. As Valleywag wrote that article about Bill Gates on Facebook and I did not have Steve Ballmer's email, I wrote to the email on the Valleywag blog here...

I included some topics like symbolic formula entry for Excel and other ideas to wrap it up. I really thought I had psychic abilities... I am not kidding, once I bought a DVD called Mindbenders about Uri Geller and sang the songs in the movie all my way home, or predicted trivial stuff, like a menu at Xmas at my auntie and other crazy stuff...

To put it in a nutshell, I wrote an email to Mr. Gates that he should follow my idea and create a secret task force team with the best programmer's in the world... I cited names like John R. Coza the GA-guy and other names, but I had no clue whom else.

I said: Mr. Gates shover 'em with billions of dollars; go stealth, - and if you think, take over Yahoo! as a manoeuvre to put sand in your enemies eyes, - but fot God's sake , pls hire me; and let me be on board or at least follow my plan through...

Well I gues I had overdone this, but I thought it was a symbolic dream I had...

Guess what? I got a reply from some OEM Manager I had known before; who told me about the Unsollicted Idea Submission Policy, and said I had good ideas and should study on, then I might join Microsoft one day...

I was completely desillusioned by Microsoft. Okay I might habe overdone the "I am on a mission" / "I have prophetic abilities" thing, but I swear to God it is 100 percent true. I even offered to volunteer a lie detection test... Yet I got an answer from Mr. Gates' assistant or whoever.

I don't know... I have a bad feeling that Microsoft ist going to acquire Yahoo! My idea about the above top secret task force would have been funnier and would have a surprise momentum at least. And hiring me officially at the cafeteria of an MS Office and inofficial having me on a top secret task force team, be it as the guy to organize food, concierge services, and what else the top programmer's would have needed, and as a sort of mascot / good luck guy, wouldn't have ruinied Microsoft either.

Personally, I wish the tone of the letter had been more aggressive: pointing out that Microsoft has failed time and time again in the web sphere and that their offer, being partially stock, is worth less because the stock is guaranteed to tank as soon as Microsoft starts “improving” Yahoo!.

Jerry, take the offer but on one condition: prior to acceptance Steve Ballmer must leave Microsoft and not return for five years. Remind everyone that Ballmer lead MSFT into its current doldrums. Make it personal; make it vicious; make it bloody.

I mean, really. MSN is as far behind Y! as Y! is behind Google. What does Microsoft bring to the table aside from the complete inability to market from a non-monopoly position?

@bigdowro: wow

@bigdowro: Pace yourself, it's only Monday morning.

@Wabewalker: you say:

I mean, really. MSN is as far behind Y! as Y! is behind Google. What does Microsoft bring to the table aside from the complete inability to market from a non-monopoly position?

Hmm... Call me crazy, but all the kids here in Europe seem to use MSN to chat (perhaps not in the US, I don't have a clue, what you use, whether MSN or ICQ or GoogleTalk or other programmes) but I think Microsoft should focus on MSN and perhaps make that a way to promote new tools. Maybe I will get tarred and feathered, but I once caught myself thinking that maybe MSN could be the next 'killer app' at least to get volume to it's Live.com site's and perhaps a search engine. As all the kids in the bus and train all talk about chatting with friends on MSN and what is your MSN number. ICQ might be better but MSN is easy to set up and use... why not use it's potential to promote other tools too.?!

Well it is Monday and I should really slow down...

"Our Board cited Yahoo!'s global brand, large worldwide audience, significant recent investments...such as the nice Herman Miller Aeron chair in my office, the collector Schwarzenegger bobblehead doll hanging from the rearview mirror of my Porsche (very hard to find anymore), the totally hot receptionist down on the 3rd floor... All of these assets add up to way more than you are proposing, Steve. And we are totally taking the light fixtures and the stove after you move in. That thing cost like 5 grand, no way do you get that in the transaction."

I'm sorry, is Jerry 5 years old? Cause you can usually promise those guys ice cream and they'll get in the car. Maybe Steve should try that.

@Wabewalker: Microsoft is in "doldrums" ? Take another look at the financials from their last few quarters. I wouldn't exactly call that a doldrum.

@bigdowro: Please post more!

@bigdowro: Amazingly enough, most of the US is dominated by AOL. The question is, will instant messaging survive the texting revolution?

@OaklandTechie: It’s stable, but not soaring. Safely flat, with some nice dividends. Follows the market.

The point is, Ballmer isn’t the man to move Microsoft into the next level. He’s fine for maintaining the status quo, but is embarrassingly incompetent when he tries to find new markets. Most of Microsoft’s expansions are reactive in nature: Live versus Google, Zune versus iPod, XBox versus PS2.

@Wabewalker: Microsoft's model has always been reactive. What else is new. They make a shit tonne of money at it.

@matto: It's not nice to make fun of "special" people.

interesting . nobosh

@Wabewalker: The point is, Ballmer isn't the man to move Microsoft into the next level. He's fine for maintaining the status quo, but is embarrassingly incompetent when he tries to find new markets. Most of Microsoft's expansions are reactive in nature: Live versus Google, Zune versus iPod, XBox versus PS2.

This reminds me of the "Getting real" ebook comment:

"This sort of one-upping Cold War mentality is a dead-end. It's an expensive, defensive, and paranoid way of building products. Defensive, paranoid companies can't think ahead, they can only think behind. They don't lead, they follow."

In some sense, the Zune stuff, is following iPod, and perhaps Live is following Google... With Microsoft, I miss the real surprising momentum. Something complete different. Microsoft product are kindof predictable (Excel, Word, ...), w/ no real innovation like symbolic formula entry, high precision calculation etc. No U.S.P. And that is true for many other products.

I know that is hard to do, but Microsoft should rethink completely its products. They should really do something like what Mario Pricken calls "Creative Sessions" [[www.mariopricken.com]] I think particularly of "Creative Destruction" i.e. and I quote "services would uninhibitedly be pulled apart, criticised, analysed, destroyed, damaged and put together again. The idea is to develop a field for experimentation in which anything can be tried out "no-risk" and most importantly to open oneself up to an abundance of new ideas. "

I don't know what Microsoft lacks some kindof of radical methods like this...