Sunday, April 27. 2008
Here's the latest news in the Yahoo/Microsoft drama. Microsoft gave us a deadline to reach a deal by April 26, 2008 12:00pm or face a hostile takeover. On April 26, the time ran out, with no deal in place. Yahoo has remained defiant and has continued to argue that $31/share for the company is too low.
Everyone is now bracing for Microsoft's next move. The Microsoftees have said they'll probably announce their next move early this week. They have several options on the table right now.
- Go ahead with the hostile takeover, and try to put Microsoft friendly people onto the Yahoo board of directors.
- Raise the offer to try to sweeten the deal.
- Walk away from the deal.
Each option has its pros and cons. If they go with the hostile takeover, it can take some time, and it'll be a fairly ugly affair. In this scenario, the Yahoo poison pill will become active, and employees can leave the company at a huge cost to Microsoft (employees are currently entitled to a hefty severance package in the event of a hostile takeover).
If they raise the offer, it might be enough for a friendly merger. However, if they raise the bid, Microsoft would have to take out debt to finance the deal. I doubt current Microsoft shareholders would appreciate that because Microsoft is currently a debt-free company which is an excellent problem to have. If Microsoft does this, I'm sure their stock will drop more.
If they walk away from the deal, then Yahoo's stock will probably take a large drop. In addition, it doesn't conclude that battle between the two companies. If Yahoo deteriorates more in the future, then we'll be weaker, and even more vulnerable to a buyout. Microsoft could simply come back during a very dark hour and offer the same bid (or slightly more), and we'll be very hard pressed to reject it. A similar tactic worked during the Oracle VS BEA Systems hostile takeover.
The Silicon Valley Insider has an article discussing the next possible moves in more detail. The article is entitled, " Next Move in the Microsoft-Yahoo Battle: Analysts, Wall Street, and SAI Readers Weigh In."
Any predictions on how this story is going to unfold?
Thursday, April 24. 2008
Today's article is entitled, " Thai Rice Hits New Record, Feeding Food Fears."
Rice prices in Thailand, the world's top exporter, surged to $1,000 a tonne on Thursday as concerns about food security first triggered by a handful of Asian export bans spread as far as the United States.
This week's five percent jump takes prices to nearly three times their level at the start of the year, intensifying fears of social unrest in Asia as millions of the region's poor find themselves struggling to pay for staple goods.
The surging price of fuel and food, which some analysts attribute to panic buying by both consumers and governments rather than a dire shortage of supply, has so far sparked riots in Africa and Haiti, but not Asia.
Having started with India's imposition of export curbs to protect domestic supplies last year, the crisis was felt in the United States this week, with major retailers saying they had started to notice signs of panic buying.
Sam's Club, a unit of retail giant Wal-Mart, said on Wednesday it was capping sales of 20-pound (9 kg) bulk bags of rice at four bags per customer per visit to prevent hoarding.
The previous day, rival Costco Wholesale Corp said it had seen increased demand for items such as rice and flour as customers, worried about global food shortages, stocked up.
This is kind of insane. I've read stories where people here are buying sacks of rice at Costco, and shipping them back home to their families in Asia because rice prices have risen so quickly. In all my years, I don't think I've seen a situation quite like this, where even in North America, we're putting restrictions of how much food we can buy.
Tuesday, April 22. 2008
Last week, ABC News held the Democratic debate between Clinton and Obama. The moderators of the debate had all these silly questions, that by the end of the debate, the audience booed them. Right after the debate, I heard the ABC website got hit with over 16,000 angry comments from viewers.
Here's a highlight reel.
It's amazing that this even passes off as a debate. The whole thing plays like a celebrity gossip interview from a show like Entertainment Tonight. I think this totally validates what Jon Stewart said about the Media back in 2004 on Crossfire.
It's kind of a sad state of affairs when news parody shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are actually delivering more relevant news content than the actual news.
Saturday, April 19. 2008
The National Post is running an article entitled, " Canada's Housing Boom Is Officially Over."
The Canadian housing boom was declared officially over Thursday.
A slide in existing home sales that started in the West late last year spread to Toronto in the first quarter of 2008, taking the heat out of prices nationwide and driving the ratio of new listings to sales to a nine-year high, figures released Thursday showed.
"Canada's six-year housing market boom is officially over," said Douglas Porter, deputy chief economist at BMO Capital Markets. "There's no question the numbers were probably distorted by a few feet of snow in the first quarter of the year, but I think there's some very real underlying cooling underway here."
The Canadian Real Estate Association reported 75,476 homes changed hands in the first quarter of 2008, down 13% from the first quarter of 2007. In March, sales dropped 18.7% from the same month the year before, including a 39.7% slide in Calgary, a 34% drop in Edmonton and a 22.2% drop in Toronto.
Average prices rose just 5.5% to $327,620 in the first quarter over the first quarter of 2007, the smallest price increase since the fourth quarter of 2001. Prices rose 11% last year and 10% on average in each of the prior five years.
I am quite happy about this news, and it further lends ammunition to us who don't believe the lies that real estate people say, like housing prices will keep going up. In this report, price rises are decelerating, and it's only a matter of time before they start declining.
People looking for houses, stay strong, it will be a buyer's market soon. Lets hope we return to a time where housing is actually affordable.
Down here in California, the real estate market is a slaughter. One of my friends who bought a house as an investment, way the heck in the middle of no where, has already seen the bank foreclose on three of her neighbours. Forests of "For Sale" signs are cropping up all over the place.
Check out this map of foreclosed properties in California.
Thursday, April 10. 2008
As you may or may not know, Microsoft has been trying to buyout Yahoo. The plot has thickened immensely in the last week. A disclaimer before we start, the opinions expressed in this article do not reflect the opinions of Yahoo; these are my opinions and mine alone.
Lets start by introducing the actors of this plot.
- Jerry Yang, CEO of Yahoo
- Google, needs no introduction
- Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft (featured in the video below)
- Rudolph Murdoch, Evil Emporer and CEO of News Corp. Owner of the Fox Network and MySpace
- Time Warner, who owns AOL (I'm surprised that they're still around too.)
So a few months back, Yahoo had already rejected Microsoft's bid of $31/share for Yahoo. On the weekend, Microsoft sent a letter to Yahoo telling us to stop dragging our feets and accept the offer. The letter says that Yahoo has no other viable alternative. The offer would expire in three weeks. This threat was supposed to scare us into submission because many believe that Yahoo's stock will plunge from $28/share now to $19/share if Microsoft pulled the plug on the deal.
At this point, things were looking kind of dark since it looked like Yahoo was out for the count, and resistance against Microsoft was futile. It was inevitable that they would take us.
That's when Jerry Yang of Yahoo launched the counter attack.
Tuesday, April 1. 2008
I became aware of Earth Hour when a girl at Yahoo sent an e-mail to a mailing list wondering why Yahoo wasn't participating in the event. The general attitude of the e-mail was, oh my goodness, we're not supporting the environment and our competitors at Google are blacking out their webpage to raise awareness. I don't know about her, but I think Yahoo does a pretty good job of supporting environmental causes. It has a portal, green.yahoo.com, which has lots of great material.
In either case, she posted this video which promotes Earth Hour 2008. The gist of it is, celebrate Earth Hour by turning off your lights for one hour on March 29st 8:00pm to reduce your carbon output.
After watching the video, I became rather cynical. I absolutely hate the hype and self-gratification that this type of event generates. You get a lot of celebrities and corporations jumping onto the bandwagon basically going, wow, look how good we are to the environment... as they drive off in their SUVs. Lets all celebrate this historical difference we're making by sitting in the dark for an hour, look at our sacrifice!
I was also quite skeptical about the environmental benefits of such an event. dr5.org has a blog entry entitled, " Earth Hour is the Perfect Example of Environmentalism" which summarizes my feelings on this event quite well:
In case you missed it, environmental groups told us that we should turn off all lights for one hour tonight. This is the perfect example of what environmentalism is all about–all spectacle and no benefit for the environment.
Earthhour.org explains that “On 31 March 2007, 2.2 million people and 2100 Sydney businesses turned off their lights for one hour - Earth Hour. If the greenhouse reduction achieved in the Sydney CBD during Earth Hour was sustained for a year, it would be equivalent to taking 48,616 cars off the road for a year.” [...]
The problem is that in reality, Earth Hours don’t achieve any real greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Turning off the lights would only reduce greenhouse gas emissions if that means this caused less coal or natural gas to be burned at a power plant. But turning off the lights for one hour will not achieve this. Coal and natural gas-fired power plants have to be kept “at temperature” and ready to produce electricity. Often these types of plants keep their boilers at 700 degrees F or higher. It can take days to heat up a boiler to these temperatures.
Reducing electricity consumption for one hour, as called for with Earth Hour will not cause the plant owner to burn any less fuel because the boilers have to be hot and ready to produce electricity at the end of the hour.
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