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The Yahoo-Microsoft deal that wasn’t: a victory for emotion and memory.

You saw it in Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang’s “OK, so now what?” post on his Yodel Anecdotal blog. And you really saw it in the comments to that post.
Yang is now being spanked throughout the blogosphere for having the temerity to say no to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Allegations of Yahoo execs high-fiving each other after the deal fell through will no doubt end up in the inevitable shareholder lawsuits.

True, the shareholders are the ones losing a lot of money as they watch the stock price sink. A thousand blog posts won’t make them believe Yang when he writes that he was trying to maximize shareholder value - his executive mandate - by hanging tough for what was believed to be $37 a share.

But he’s also blogged about keeping another group in mind during this process: customers. End users. The people whose patronage ends up paying the bills. Yahoo! isn’t doing as good a job at keeping them happy as it used to, but enough fans still exist and they want an independent, Microsoft-free Yahoo!

Yang said no simply because it was Microsoft. Call it the Anybody-But-Microsoft club’s last hurrah. Its heyday was the mid-to-late 1990s and it led to Bill Gates and Co. getting its own antitrust spanking from the Clinton Justice Department. Yang and crew are charter ABM members and they simply could not tolerate handing over the reins of the company they built to Microsoft.

Emotion - and Microsoft’s reputation - were also evident throughout the comments to Yang’s blog post. Some of the shareholder fury was of the eyeball-melting variety, but there were also these comments:

I’m glad Yahoo stuck up for itself and its users.
Jerry, ignore all the day traders and concentrate on your consumers and you know that your company will do awesome.
MSFT is increasingly irrelevant in this new internet order and it’s good to see them stew.
I am glad to see that the MS takeover failed, and hope that from these scenarios people learn to listen.
This was really a step to save the web and innovation. remember what MS did to hotmail…it took years to update the stuff (until others got ahead of it).

The blog comments section is a fascinating look at how money and mission statements divide this issue. The ones focusing on money are shareholders. The ones focusing on mission are, for the most part, users. Some of them actually have constructive suggestions on how to fix the company: focus on search, mail, Flickr, etc.

One angry commenter claims to be no fan of Microsoft but was willing to hold his nose to get $33 a share.
Microsoft may be a chastened version of its former late-‘90s self, but it’s still Microsoft and institutional memory still runs deep in Silicon Valley.

Read [Yodel Anecdotal]