More Microsoft Money For Yahoo? Probably Not

Yahoo’s efforts to convince the world, and its suitor from Redmond, the company is worth more than Microsoft’s proposal hasn’t brought in a viable competing bid.

Consolidation happens in the business world. Companies grow, compete, and buy out the ones who can’t keep pace. Electronics, soft drinks, automobiles, pick a sector, someone has knifed someone right in the ledger, watched the red ink bleed out, and cleaned up for the cost of a tissue or two. It happens.

It’s happening in the Internet services arena, where Google’s search dominance and Microsoft’s money-printing Office and Windows franchises have more perceived value than Yahoo, the web destination with the heaviest traffic. Microsoft watched Yahoo tank down under $19 a share, and pounced.

Only a clever bit of bylaw rewriting bought Yahoo a few more months until Jerry Yang and Yahoo’s board have to decide whether their fiduciary duty to shareholders means giving in gracefully to Microsoft, or engaging in a running proxy fight for control of the board.

Kara Swisher at All Things D took the pulse of Yahoo investors, and found some rising blood pressures on the parts of the powerful institutional backers who hold interests in both Yahoo and Microsoft:

And the bottom line from several of them – if Yahoo does not wise up and start seriously kibitzing with Microsoft over its takeover bid sooner than later, then some investors have signaled to the company