by 
Yahoo’s Q2 results, although disappointing, were far from surprising. Continued poor performance, management shake up—sometimes it seems like their tales of woe may never end.
But all may not be lost (yet). ZDNet covers a thorough report by Robert Peck, analyst for Bear Stearns (not, as I almost typed, Bear Grylls), that explores many of Yahoo’s options to turn their future around. And, it seems, the bottom line is that Yahoo should snap up a social network (I hear they’re delicious) (pun unintended, but I’ll take it).
The polls on the page indicate that many agree with ZDNet’s conclusions: 75% of the nearly 200 respondents said that Yahoo should buy a social networking site. 41% of the nearly 250 respondents to their second poll chose Facebook as the network they should acquire. (I should probably mention here that the New York Times also covered this topic, but their page failed to load for me, despite repeated attempts.)
But I’m not sure we should trust these people’s opinions: 20% said the best choice was Orkut. You know, Google’s Orkut. I dare say that would be a supremely bad business strategy: attempt to buy something from a competitor that’s for sale and signal your desperation and ultimate capitulation.
As for trusting Peck’s opinion, you can judge for yourself:
Peck says the impediment to a Yahoo purchase is price. He said Yahoo has most likely considered Facebook, Bebo, Friendster and MySpace, but couldn’t close a deal. Peck estimates that Facebook is worth as much as $5 billion to $6 billion depending on how you slice the numbers.
That may be what Facebook is worth (in some strange way), but what Facebook wants is more like $10 billion. Good luck there.
