What Can Microsoft Offer Yahoo?

You’d be hard-pressed to find many things to which Peter Drucker was as openly hostile as the hostile takeover. In his book The New Realities, he went so far as to call the gobbling up of companies in this fashion “the most serious assault on management in its history—a far more serious assault than any mounted by Marxists.”

Mind you, he made these comments in 1989, when all too many real-life Gordon Gekkos were commanding center stage. What rankled Drucker was the tendency of these corporate raiders to quickly dismantle the enterprises they’d just gotten their hands on, as if they were stolen cars, “sacrificing long-range, wealth-producing capacity to short-term gains.”

Of course, the unsolicited takeover proposal dominating the news these days—Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo—doesn’t fit this mold. Microsoft hopes to strengthen Yahoo’s core assets, not strip them.