Ask PG: What's your take on the Yahoo! situation?

Given the recent events, and that you sold Viaweb to Yahoo!, I'm curious to find out what you think of the whole Yahoo! situation. Carl Icahn has recently engaged in a proxy fight. Or is at least flirting with one. Should it have accepted Microsoft's offer?

Ask PG: What should I have for lunch?

PG seems to have become a gnomic magic 8 ball of sorts. I can only hope for his sake that he's built Eliza-like behavior into HN such that his responses to all "Ask PG" questions are fully automated.

I'm not sure that I agree here.

Despite the public statements to the contrary, I suspect that Yang's motivations are not about the short-term financial plan, but about the long-term survival of the company and of their culture.

Microsoft is a massive organization, and has had several problems integrating smaller players into it's corporate structure. My suspicion is that a number of higher-level Yahoo members are convinced that if the Microsoft were to go through, they'd lose the ability to continue to decide their own fates. Look at the AOL-TW merger for an example of the clashes that can arise when trying to combine two massive companies with dissimilar cultures.

Yahoo employees may additionally be concerned, given that their potential suitor has quite a history of purchasing, or nearly purchasing companies, and not fully utilizing them.

In immediate dollar terms, no, turning the deal down doesn't make sense.. But in a long-term view of "where do we want Yahoo to be in 5 years", it makes all the sense in the world.

The problem for the Board is that the stockholders are more interested in the former, than the later, so Yahoo is trying to contort to justify using a framing they don't agree with.

I wonder who submitted the first "Ask YC" and "Ask PG" posts?

I think if Jerry and Filo had a chance to run the company for a while, they could probably surprise people. They're probably as smart as Larry and Sergey, but they've never had a chance to run Yahoo the way they'd like. If they had, it would have more of a hacker culture, and Google wouldn't be trampling them so badly.