"It is clear to me that the board of directors of Yahoo has acted irrationally and lost the faith of shareholders and Microsoft. It is quite obvious that Microsoft's bid of $33 per share is a superior alternative to Yahoo's prospects on a standalone basis. I am perplexed by the board's actions. It is irresponsible to hide behind management's more than overly optimistic financial forecasts. It is unconscionable that you have not allowed your shareholders to choose to accept an offer that represented a 72% premium over Yahoo's closing price of $19.18 on the day before the initial Microsoft offer. I and many of your shareholders strongly believe that a combination between Yahoo and Microsoft would form a dynamic company and more importantly would be a force strong enough to compete with Google on the Internet."

So what is Yahoo! going to do after Microsoft (YAM)? I mean, besides endure fidicuary lawsuits and soldier on as before.

Well, Read Write Web says they should focus on the great services consumers love like flickr, which they call the new heart. Marshall K writes "...  Flickr is the new heart of Yahoo! and many early adopters (like our readers) are probably more likely to use Yahoo! services like Del.icio.us, Upcoming or even the new FireEagle than they are to be big Yahoo! Sports or Finance fans."

It's hard not to read this and choke, because my impression is that the senior executives at Yahoo think that the future--and the places investment should be focused--are --

a) APEX, the engineering intensive interactive advertising platform
b) Yahoo OS--Big purple's take on web services, platforms, and Web 3.0
c) Front doors and content personalization--ie How to make Yahoo's front page and the front pages of top content destinations like finance and sports more profitable and compelling (okay, "sticky)

If you asked folks at the company whether resources were flowing to the RWW list, or to the list above, you might get some interesting insights into where Y! is putting its bets.

In other words, management knows its ideas--and the great talent the company has-- are going to pull the rabbit out of the hat, and darn it, one day the rest of us will see that.

Or, Jerry and Sue have some secret, magical powers we just haven't seen yet (besides a golden parachute, I mean).

Susan sez: Maybe another way to say this is that there's both an audience and a generation gap...cause I don't think the RWW properties are what Y! sees topping their success list, but hey, I don't work there, I'm jest sayin.'

Mashable has a post tonight that Jajah has done a deal with Yahoo! to be the first client to use their Managed Services suite (based on a story by Alec Saunders, here). I've been a fan of this company since I first talked to them in late 2006, and it's good to see they finally have the Yahoo! deal they've been dancing around for a while. As Alex says : "JAJAH's network now spans over 200 points of presence all knit together by a global VoIP backbone. Using a combination of industry standard codecs, a proprietary codec of their own creation, and automated quality measurement tools, Mattes claims quality indistinguishable from the PSTN."

In other words, they've been building out considerable capacity and capabilty for a while and this deal gives them the large scale, name brand partner to take growth to the next level, and improve the revenue streams.

Nice.