Liveblogging: Yahoo's Decker and Yang

After a funny film featuring nearly every luminary under the sun giving Yang and Decker advice (Buffet, Stringer, Zuckerberg, etc.), Yang and Decker took the stage and Walt immediately asked them about the MSFT deal. Yang agreed that they could not get to a price, but that there were other issues as well. Regulatory is one that came up, but I can imagine others (i.e., approach to open source, total installs of Outlook at Yahoo, etc.!).

What is the concept around the Google deal? Yang: We feel strongly about how we monetize search, but there is clearly a value gap between us and (Google), we want to make it clear to our shareholders that there are other untapped sources of value that should we want to tap that…could be significant…” We’ve conducted tests with them and we have some understandings…as to the level of discussion…we are uniquely positioned ….should anything be done (between Google and Yahoo) it’d be unique… Yahoo has the ability to remain very competitive in the advertising space…the level and flexibility of how we might partner has not been well understood…(he doesn’t want to talk about it)…

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