Media Buzz Suggests Microsoft Will Fight Yahoo’s Rebuff

Only hours after the Board of Directors of Yahoo Inc (NASDAQ: YHOO) announced its rejection of Microsoft Corp’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) $44.6 billion buyout bid, speculation began to mount in the business news media as to how the folks at Redmond would respond.

For example, the Financial Times reported that the Redmond software titan “is gearing up to take its bid to acquire Yahoo directly to the Silicon Valley company’s shareholders” (read the FT.com article by Chris Nuttall and Richard Waters ).

By mid-afternoon Monday, however, there was still no official word from Microsoft itself on how it would respond to Yahoo’s notice of rejection.

Microsoft’s share price was down from the previous close of $28.56 to $28.21 at the bell (4:00pm ET).

Given the stakes involved for the company’s long-term strategic position, NewsVisual created an IntellectSpace Knowledge Map that illustrates the business connections among Microsoft’s Board of Directors in order to determine whether they are prepared to meet the company’s potential legal and public relations challenges as a result of the company’s ongoing bid for Yahoo.

The Knowledge Map shows that Microsoft’s Board is extremely diverse in terms of the number of different industries represented.

For example, besides the software and computer industries, Microsoft Directors have experience in several other industries: Director Dina Dublon is the former CFO of JPMorgan Chase; Director Raymond Martin is the former Chairman/President/CEO Merck & Co; Director Reed Martin is the Founder/Chairman/CEO of Netflix; and Director Charles Noski is the former Vice-Chairman AT&T Corp.

This corporate diversity demonstrates some of the reasons why it has been able to maintain it position as the largest software company in the world.

(Note: the information contained and presented in Knowledge Maps is public information from the Securities and Exchange Commission of the United States of America).