Yahoo shareholders react (let the lawsuits begin!)

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang may be relieved that the company he founded didn't wind up in the hands of Microsoft -- its polar opposite in corporate culture. But Yang can't expect all of the stock holders to be happy. And indeed, some of them are making their misery immediately apparent. True, lots of folks out there are rooting for the underdog, Yahoo, and pointing to Yahoo's amazing strides in social networking. The fact is, it is a publicly traded company that makes its money on advertising revenue. And most of the market is going to Google, who, by the way, also knows a thing or too about the power of social networking. It's like the line from the 1991 movie Other People's Money, where the mean-old corporate raider Larry the Liquidator (Danny DiVito) wins the proxy vote by reminding people why they became shareholders to begin with ... to make money.

In the meantime, the complaints have begun. Two public pension funds from the city of Detroit plan to expand a complaint against Yang and the Yahoo board, this story from IDG News Service reports. The complaint alleges that they failed to act in the best interest of shareholders in rejecting Microsoft's bid to buy Yahoo.

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