Corporate Wolves Circle Yahoo's Goose

Alright, my first prediction for 2009: Yahoo gets carved up like a Christmas goose. No more corporate pussyfooting, no more billionaire shouting matches, just the stealthy, calculated approach toward the crippled wheezing of the would-be carrion. Soon it will all be over in a rush of feathers and blood.

Surely only Kevin Bostock, Jerry Yang, and Steve Ballmer know what really happened to cause Microsoft’s courtship to go sour. The Occam’s Razor version is that Ballmer was generous, Yang and Bostock were proud, and Balmer got his feelings hurt and retaliated against their all with his nothing. But perhaps just before Yahoo was about to accept the original proposal, Ballmer, like Blockbuster later did with Circuit City, got a glimpse of the inevitable future: the heart on Yahoo’s sleeve would hit the ground shortly before the rest of it did.

For even as Carl Icahn seemed certain to wrest control of Yahoo’s poison pill and force the sale, Ballmer kept his cold distance. What seemed like pride at the time may turn out to be prudence. Ballmer’s strategy (my imagining of his strategy) matched President-Elect Obama’s in the end. Stand back, hold your punches and let the other side defeat itself. When it does, buy from the clearance rack just ahead of liquidation.

Last week Icahn purchased seven million more shares in Yahoo, at around $10 and not $25 like last spring, upping his stake to five percent. A quietly confident move as Yahoo prepares to layoff employees, somehow speaking louder than his finagling of proxy to veto Bostock and Yang amid those gloriously venomous letters between the three.

Again, just as Icahn was about to force his hand, he suddenly (and anticlimactically) withdrew it, and spectators marveled at the sudden appearance of mercy at the hands of a corporate raider. Perhaps it wasn’t sincere mercy, but instead a sense of clairvoyant faith that time would prove him right, that the fog of Bostock’s righteous anger would clear and the simple truth would emerge.

Now, as Bostock and Yang are bled of credibility, as Google’s search deal with Yahoo, thanks to Microsoft and mysterious corn growers,  collapses under government scrutiny, and as Icahn ups his stake, there are new players on the stage. Amid could exit Mountain View for Washington, or even (in a Hail Mary pass of predictions) sidle over to Sunnyvale to take over Yang’s intended-to-be-temporary reign, new heavy-hitters emerge, each with their own entangling alliances.

While America feasted last week, Britain’s total fiction,” and Swisher notes Yahoo’s current entire market cap is just $16 billion.

Since Levinsohn’s denial new reports have emerged that Levinsohn, Miller, and News Corp. President Peter Chernin all tapping foreign investors to raise money for a different bid on Yahoo, this one as reported also severely overpaying at an offering of $30 billion. Then again, he may have just been raising money