[JohnN]

>"Nothing personal, but that's the kind of shareholder that ruins good businesses. The language of Ballmer's letter is clearly intended to cause precisely that kind of action from Yahoo! shareholders."

Perhaps you are right. But shareholders rarely hold stock to build good businesses they are there to make money. They would happily invest in a bad company if it was about to be bought out for a huge premium. Once you go public, few things matter other than the numbers.

Plus 72% of Yahoo shareholders are professional money managers, arbitrageurs, and regular investors. These people are likely to want this deal to go through.

[umjames]

I cannot think of a better advertisement for staying small and profitable. Why work so hard for financial and creative indepenence, and then have money-hungry shareholders take that away for their own motives?

It's not only bad VCs that can do this, apparently bad shareholders can too.

[DougBTX]

Or to sell both A and B class shares :)

[JohnN]

Yer....I think Google did this.