MediaFile

Some Yahoo shareholders are mad, some are sad and some have a remarkable handle on the English language.

Despite the odds going into today’s annual meeting, Yahoo’s board and CEO Jerry Yang won a huge endorsement from shareholders. Yang alone won more than 85 percent of votes cast despite calls by some for his ouster.

But that didn’t dampen the festivities at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose. Here are a few choice quotes from the meeting, where investors were invited to lament over failed deal talks with Microsoft, rich compensation for executives and Yahoo’s stance on Internet censorship.

“I’d like to see timesheets posted on the Internet for the work of the directors as well as the executives of the company,” said Dirk Neyhart, a retired stockbroker from Berkeley, California, who said he holds less than 1,000 shares of Yahoo.

“I would be more than happy to submit timesheets for the work that I have done in the last 6 months. It’s been about 26 hours in the course of a 24-hour day,” said Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock.

If for some reason you assumed that Yahoo’s deal with Carl Icahn would quiet the chatter about a deal, you were mistaken. The conference call to discuss quarterly earnings made that clear.

Past distractions, future possibilities, it was all there for listeners. The only problem is that for all the chatter on the call about deals, there was no real insight offered about what Yahoo might do.

Here’s a look at what Yahoo’s executives said about M&A during the call:

There was much written in the sports pages (and in some cases the business pages) about Tiger Woods’ decision to miss the rest of the golf season and undergo reconstructive knee surgery.  

His absence is a big deal for sports fans – not to mention marketers and TV networks. After all, he is the biggest American sports machine since Michael Jordan.   

 ”Much like Michael Jordan did (Woods) has the power of drawing in the more casual viewer or participant to the sport,” Stifel Nicolaus analyst Thomas Shaw told Reuters. “He has the ability of driving some participation. It gets people excited to get out and dust off the clubs and play some.”

So Microsoft is now proposing a new deal: This one could be some sort of partnership or joint venture for search-related advertising to take on Google Inc, the New York Times reports.

Just one problem. Carl Icahn doesn’t appear to be hot on the idea. Reuters, citing a person familiar his with the financier’s thinking, reports that this latest talk about an partial Microsoft-Yahoo alliance could prompt the billionaire investor to press Yahoo to further pursue a deal with Google.

“Microsoft is trying to get the milk without buying the cow, and if you look at Icahn’s history, he has never been used that way,” said this person. “He does not want to see Yahoo pushed into some joint venture with Microsoft and is not going to be used to push Yahoo into it.”

Remember those scary movie close-ups of a fly caught in a spider’s web, or some tourist who steps into quicksand, or another variation of the same? How with each twist and turn to get free, the captive enmeshes themselves deeper into the trap? 

We’re starting to get that uncomfortable feeling about Yahoo as it dodges the embrace of Microsoft while trying to orchestrate a partnership with Google that won’t encroach on its own business. The New York Post says today that a deal with Google, already at the “any minute now” stage for almost a month, could be sealed next week.
    
Some of the moves could provide a boost down the line, like a new ad-trading partnership with WPP Group, the world’s second largest advertising services company. 
    
[N.B. WPP chief Martin Sorrell said last week it was a shame Yahoo and Microsoft couldn't work it out, since their break-up just leaves Google the biggest kid in the playground]
    
But Yahoo does not have that much more time to prove it can go it alone. Yesterday, Yahoo stood up to billionaire Carl Icahn, who officially launched his proxy fight to deliver the company back to Microsoft. That means there must be some resolution by the time Yahoo’s shareholders meet on July 3. (Reuters)

Keep an eye on:    
* “Gossip Girl” can’t save ratings for the CW network. (WSJ)
    
* Fox embraces Less Is More principle, cutting ad time for two new shows. (Hollywood Reporter via Reuters)

Some might detect the faintest note of irony in the fact that Carl Icahn has nominated Mark Cuban to be one of Yahoo’s directors as part of his proxy fight against the company. It was Cuban, after all, who sold the now defunct Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5 billion+ at the peak of the dot com boom.

Cuban, now known best as the enthusiastic owner of the Dallas Mavericks pro basketball team, seems to be relishing the opportunity to take on Yahoo’s rival Google. He wrote on his blog Wednesday:

“Is there anything more fun than sitting around, growing your hair, drinking a Bud while listening to Jethro Tull and pondering how to change the balance of power in the search world and unseat Google?”