Yahoo: Anybody-But-Microsoft Club’s last hurrah

The Yahoo-Microsoft deal that wasn’t: a victory for emotion and memory.

You saw it in Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang’s “OK, so now what?” post on his Yodel Anecdotal blog. And you really saw it in the comments to that post.Yang is now being spanked throughout the blogosphere for having the temerity to say no to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Allegations of Yahoo execs high-fiving each other after the deal fell through will no doubt end up in the inevitable shareholder lawsuits.

True, the shareholders are the ones losing a lot of money as they watch the stock price sink. A thousand blog posts won’t make them believe Yang when he writes that he was trying to maximize shareholder value – his executive mandate – by hanging tough for what was believed to be $37 a share.

But he’s also blogged about keeping another group in mind during this process: customers. End users. The people whose patronage ends up paying the bills. Yahoo! isn’t doing as good a job at keeping them happy as it used to, but enough fans still exist and they want an independent, Microsoft-free Yahoo!