I highly recommend this article from page A1 of today’s Wall Street Journal for anybody interested in why Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) buyout offer for Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) fell through at the last minute. It reads less like a business story and more like a suspense novel.
It has all the intrigue of a Hollywood blockbuster: two forces uniting against a common enemy, secret meetings at remote aiports, a woman with a red umbrella to signal that the coast is clear, private CEO-to-CEO meetings in the back of a private jet, and a promise of a sequel!
Best of all, it continues to promote and elevate the prominence of the search engine industry and all of the secondary industries built around it. The drama may cause more than a few sleepless nights for Steve Ballmer, Jerry Yang and their armies of foot soldiers, but it is first class entertainment for those of us in the peanut gallery.
And if you prefer dialogue to suspense, it doesn’t get much better than one Microsoftie’s face-saving quote as the closing credits roll,
“They believed that we needed them much more than they needed us. Ultimately we called their bluff.”
Get ready for the sequel where Microsoft returns to buy just the search part of Yahoo’s business. This time it’s personal!
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