This is such a fitting post considering that I’ve been chatting about board of directors and what not. As we all know, Microsoft recently made a bid to buy Yahoo! which Yahoo! rejected.

Well, instead of raising the bid, Microsoft has decided to go after a HOSTILE takeover. As TechCrunch reports:

“Microsoft is preparing to try to unseat Yahoo’s board members in a proxy battle that could cost as much as $30 million (which is still cheaper than raising its bid).”

Now I heard that and thought: “Damn, that’s smart…what’s Yahoo! going to do?” Well the good ol’ boys at Yahoo! had a response and one that just made me laugh and think “Ha Ha Microsoft!” (think in the voice of Nelson from The Simpsons).

Yahoo, for its part, amended its severance plan to cover all employees in case of a change in control of ownership. It includes accelerated vesting of options, continued severance pay of between four to 24 months of each employee’s base salary, plus $3,000 to $15,000 in outplacement services per laid-off employee. And there are going to be a lot of those after the merger.

The part about “accelerating the vesting of options” is just PURE genius. What better way to scare off someone from acquiring you than to tell them: “Sure, go ahead, but once you do, everyone gets their money and everyone (the employees) leave and you’re left with nothing!”

My hats off to you Yahoo - you brought a smirk to my face.

But I guess this is one of the problems with becoming a HUGE company - you get a few MBAs involved and this crap starts to happen. Can’t we all just get along, make money and hug?

Source: I first learned of this at TechCrunch…

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Big Companies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.