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The Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training.

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He looks like such a cuddly, geek-in-the-C-suite kind of guy. And he said he was going to fend off the Evil Microsoft Empire and leave Yahoo, icon of the Digital Age, free and independent. It sounded so good.

Before Microsoft made its offer, Yahoo shares were trading at under $20. There was a reason for that. Many investors and others thought that Yahoo had no chance for profitability any time soon.

Then came the Monster from Redmond with an offer of $31 per share to buy Yahoo. It was like the Godfather or Rupert Murdoch. It was the offer that you can't refuse. But Yahoo, in the person of its founder and CEO Jerry Yang, did refuse it.

That started the mating dance. Yahoo talked to other suitors like Time Warner. They pretended they wanted to strike a deal with Google. They dummied up some financial projections to make it look like they would actually make a profit. Just changing the naumbers doesn't change reality.

The original deadline for a deal passed. But the mating dance continued. Microsoft, improbably, upped the offer to $33 per share. At that point I thought, "Oh my God, Steve Ballmer's got target fixation and he'll push for the deal no matter what." I was wrong.

Yahoo's CEO and founder, Jerry Yang, decided that $33 a share for an unprofitable, directionless company that had been trading at $19 before talks started was too little. He asked for $37.

I don't know what Steve Ballmer thought right then, but it must have been something like, "What the heck?!" To his credit, he said, "No deal" then took his money and went home to figure out another way to beat Google.

I always thought the winner in all this would be Google. But I never thought it would play out the way it did.

Besides Google, there's only one winner in this. It sure isn't the Yahoo investors. Their share price is settling slowly back to where it was.

How about Yahoo employees? No joy there. They know they're in a leaky boat and the captain is too busy parading about the deck in his captain's garb to set a course.

How about Yahoo users? That's a wash. Back in February, I said I thought that Microsoft getting together with Yahoo was like mating a gorilla and a donkey. You don't get a racehorse that way. Yahoo alone is no worse than it would be with Microsoft, but it's no better either.

What about Microsoft? They've still got the problem of how to replace their desktop close-to-monopoly and figure out how to make money online. In the meantime, their insistence that everybody migrate to their clunky new operating system, Vista, will probably cause a surge in Mac sales.

No, folks, the only winner here is Jerry Yang. He gets to stay on as founder. He gets to wander the halls and receive the accolades of the little people. He gets interviewed by the media.

Sure, his personal fortune will take a hit as the stock price returns to the bottom of the chart. But what's a few million dollars compared to being a founder and icon? No matter what happens to the stock, Jerry isn't going to have to check his credit card balance before filling up the gas tank any time soon.

But wait, what's that sound? Sounds to me like chickens coming home to roost. Or maybe it's vultures circling.

There are a lot of very angry people out there. The investors are restless. And Microsoft may not be done. And for what? Because Jerry Yang needed to be an icon more than he wanted to be a good CEO.

Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.

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Wally Bock has helped people learn to be great bosses for more than a quarter century. His latest book, Performance Talk: The One-on-One Part of Leadership, makes learning key leadership principles almost effortless by teaching through a story and providing lists of resources for further growth.

Click here to find out more about Wally's coaching services.

For weekly tips and resources pointers, check our Wally Bock's Three Star Leadership Letter.

Click here to find out more about having Wally speak to your company or convention.