“If you’re a Microsoft shareholder, you shouldn’t be wondering whether CEO Steve Ballmer overpaid for Skype,” Evan Newmark writes for The Wall Street Journal. “That’s a waste of time. Of course, he overpaid.”
“Here’s a much better question: why is this man still CEO?” Newmark wonders. “That’s just how bad this deal is.”
“It’s one thing for a CEO to convince himself that a deal is ‘strategic’ – even if he’s buying a money-loser with no proprietary technology and no viable business model. But it’s another for him to bid against himself and end up forking over $8.5 billion in cold cash to buy said money-loser – three times what it fetched a year and a half ago,” Newmark writes. “That’s unforgivable.”
Newmark writes, “Why the Microsoft board is happily going along with this folly is a mystery to me. Then again, this is the same board that blessed Ballmer’s profligate $48 billion bid for Yahoo. Such is the fate of a company with too much money, too few good ideas and a share price that can’t break $30.”
“With Skype, Ballmer isn’t just guilty of poor timing or overpaying. It’s worse. He’s guilty of putting Microsoft into a position where it is compelled to buy companies like Yahoo and Skype that nobody else really wants,” Newmark writes. “Microsoft’s board would be doing its long-suffering shareholders a favor by making this dumb deal Ballmer’s last.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Here’s hoping that Microsoft’s board and shareholders remain in their collective stupor and continue to leave Ballmer “in charge” for as long as it takes.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
Ballmer: Microsoft won’t drop Skype support for Mac, iOS – May 10, 2011
Microsoft’s Ballmer reportedly tricked into overbidding for Skype by $4.5 billion – May 10, 2011
Skype releases patch for zero-day vulnerability in Skype 5 for Mac – May 10, 2011
Microsoft + Skype = $8.5 billion thrown into a bonfire – May 10, 2011
Microsoft buys Skype for $8.5 billion; company’s largest-ever acquisition – May 10, 2011
Ballmer is the Anti-Jobs.