"Having to face my staff tomorrow will not be so much fun and I need some Prozac, since I don't know what I can say to them about how our leadership is going to get our company going again."

Hehe. Especially staff that have stock options... Merry Prozac Day!

I think the above execs who were ready to sell to MSFT were not up to taking the challenge. They are at Y! only for money and stock options. They will probably leave and join Kara Swisher (since they feel closer to her than Y!). And that's the best thing that happened for Y! in a while.

I thought this was a match made in hell.. but with some marriage counseling Yang and Ballmer could have got together and made something good out of it. Founders have a hard time thinking big picture..

I don't know, the last time Jerry stepped back we got a Hollywood CEO that hired a bunch of his friends down in L.A. (and the technology completely stagnated). Who's up next, Amy Iorio?

Y! has had too many VPs for ages.

I'm hoping they all quit. I hear MSFT is hiring.

Looking forward to the next 100 day plan.

@yankini and LongAgoYahoo: thank you for speaking the truth. That was exactly my feeling about too many Y! higher ups.

I'm sorry - but I find it hard to believe that "a dozen execs, VP or above" would give someone like Kara Swisher ridiculous quotes like those.

How Valleywagesque of her to post that.

There is no outcome that would be satisfactory. If Yahoo had said yes, Swisher would probably complain that the price was too low.

For any of the people at the top at Yahoo to quit they would have to have (1) guts, (2) self confidence, (3) integrity. Such things are not in short supply at Yahoo, they are non-existent.

Of course the same can be said for many large SV companies as well as Microsoft at this point. Anyone willing to take risks is already out there doing it at start-ups.

I think this exec sentiment is odd as well. Y! is a company that still nets hundreds of millions of dollars each year, has an enormous audience, etc.

Yes, they have gotten Googled, and they probably will never dominate again, but they don't need to reach AOL-like irrelevance either. Execs who had their hearts broken by Ballmer's rejection seem to be focused on something other than SV grit and innovation.

Yahoo! has a better chance of getting back to a price above the Microsoft offer (where it was not all that long ago) without Microsoft than with it. It has a much better chance of doubling its share price than Microsoft does.

A couple of good quarters, like the last one, and the street will run the stock back up.

On the other hand, I suspect Jerry would be perfectly happy to welcome a new CEO, if the right person came along.

At this point, a pretty good way of clearing out the deadwood at Yahoo that only cares about options and cash would be to do a company-wide poll of who is disappointed that they didn't take the MS offer and fire everyone who was. This will leave the people who want to fight and win.

Davion;'clearing out the deadwood at Yahoo that only cares about options and cash' You do work in the Valley, right?

Perhaps the execs who were complaining were doing so not for the money but because as a group they new the reality-that combined there are far too incompetent to actually compete. Time for all of them to jump overboard. After all, even if a deal was/is done aren't these people just as worthless (maybe more so) to a combined MicroHoo?

@SeanPara: hilarious

@Davion: ...then what? They all join hands and sing kumbaya?