Amongst all the handwringing and talk of Yahoo’s stock price plunge Jason Kottke makes a pretty salient observation…
On Jan 31, the day before Microsoft offered $31/share for Yahoo, YHOO was at $19.18/share (market cap: $26.4 billion) and MSFT was at $32.60/share (market cap: $303.6 billion). At the close of trading today, YHOO closed at $24.37/share (market cap: $33.5 billion) and MSFT was at $29.08/share (market cap: $270.8 billion). In other words, the Microsoft offer increased the value of Yahoo! Inc. by more than $7 billion and decreased the value of Microsoft Corporation by almost $33 billion.
Read the rest of Jason Kottke’s post, Yahoo stock plunges?.
Certainly Yahoo’s stock price wasn’t on fire before the Microsoft offer and Yahoo has issues, but personally I’m erring toward the don’t sell side of the fence. Not because I don’t like MS (I do and I use MS Products all day long), it’s more because I like the idea that there are three big guys competing in search, I really like lots of the Yahoo products, I think they’ve brought lots of great talent in many of their acquisitions, and I want to see them have a chance to pull it all together.
I have no skin in this fight and I have no real insight to most of the big issues here (eg. cultural fit, technology fit, people fit), but selling doesn’t feel good for the internet.
Check out this 10 year chart of YHOO stock prices. That sure puts the recent fluctuations in context.