Academic

As Gordon notes below, Microsoft has turned up the heat on Yahoo, and Ballmer aims to make shareholders anxious.  Meanwhile, the New York Times reports on what seems to be the best chance for Yahoo to convince its shareholders to ignore Microsoft: its new AMP advertising system.  The system, NYT reports, would "would greatly simplify the task of selling online ads, allowing Yahoo?s publishing partners, for instance, to place ads on their own sites as well as on Yahoo and on the sites of other publishers in the company?s growing network."  Yahoo acknowledges that the system will not be put in place for some months.  The announcement timing raises some interesting issues--this seems like a risky play, and I'm sure that the lawyers were wringing their hands because on the one hand Yahoo wants to produce something that would inspire confidence with shareholders, while on the other hand I suspect that with Microsoft lurking in the background Yahoo disclosed this earlier than they would have liked to.  Yahoo may not have a very good sense sense of the potential of the product and when it could deliver the product.  An analyst notes this risk: 

?This gives Yahoo a little leadership in vision,? said Rachel Happe, an analyst with IDC, a consulting firm. But Ms. Happe noted that Yahoo?s last big advertising project, a platform known as Panama [recall that the Panama experiment was one of the unsuccessful initiatives Ballmer pointed to in his bear hug letter] and intended to reach people searching the Internet, was plagued by lengthy delays. She said it would be ?problematic? for Yahoo if it were not able to deliver AMP on time.

"Problematic" may be another way of saying "shareholder lawsuits".