Yahoo Shareholders Skeptical of Deal, Prices Drop

If I happened to be a Yahoo! shareholder, I’d be pretty amped about the deal with Microsoft. The opportunity to wrest some of the search engine market back from the big G would sound like a welcome prospect. Actual shareholders are taking a different stance, however. According to the Wall Street Journal, shareholders are distraught over a few aspects of the deal including lack of upfront payment (analysts had Microsoft paying up to $1 billion for the deal), surrendering too much control to Bing and Yahoo’s apparent withdrawal from the search engine space, which unbeknownst to many, it still occupies. Share prices have fallen as much as 12% over the course of the day, the largest single-day fall since CEO Carol Bartz took the helm. Yahoo has defended the deal, emphasizing that it will allow the company to continually garner revenue from search, while investing in other areas. It also stressed that the deal will give Yahoo a better competitive position with Google. [via WSJ]