Can Yahoo chief stop the merger deal from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer?

Today one of the biggest challenges for the managers is to perform well otherwise they need to face with some of the harsh reality of the corporate world. Get sacked or company is acquired by other companies and they eventually lose the freedom. Yahoo Corporation was facing problem for quite a long time in integrating some of the big applications it developed (or acquired) over the last 10-15 years. As I am always sceptic about the valuation of the online business (with most of the asset as intangible), I did find it difficult to understand how it was valued so high on the stock market. I think even the shareholders of the yahoo were also thinking similarly and wanted to see some hard cash earnings from the businesses that yahoo was building for so long. As soon as the shareholders started asking for the return company got into problem. One of the best sources of the earning for the yahoo was advertising. It had lots of online customers and it could attract advertisers to pay for the advertising space but this was not enough.

Yahoo is performing (financially) so poor that now the shareholders will not wait to see some charisma from the yahoo. Shareholders are now very much aware that the company management is not able to turn around to make it a success so one of the options is to replace the whole management team but that is not possible at this moment because it is too late. Other option to merge with some company and Microsoft seems the only interested company to pay such a huge price for the products, yahoo has got. No doubt, yahoo has some of the very well known products (yahoo mail) in its portfolio but getting value out of them is not so easy.

Since Microsoft needs someone to boost its online presence so it would be willing to pay higher price for this deal. At this moment, Google is becoming so powerful everyday in online market that if Microsoft could not catch it now, it will never be able to catch that. Microsoft has money and all resources so it will not stop this deal even when the Yahoo board has rejected the deal. Yahoo can only try to persuade Microsoft to pay little higher price. I doubt that Microsoft would pay too high price now because it knows if it drop this deal then the share price for Yahoo will down (probably to single digit) and eventually, it will not get what it can get now. One of the best ways for Yahoo is to find some other organization that will be interested in bidding against Microsoft. In 2008, US economy seems to slow down so chances are rare that any company (other than Microsoft that has cash earning machine) will be willing to risk such a high amount and it mainly in cash.