Yahoo meeting a yawner after all

For much of the spring and early summer, Yahoo's shareholder meeting loomed as the potential defining moment in Microsoft's battle to take control of the company and its valuable online properties.

At one time, Microsoft was planning a proxy fight and was lining up its own set of Yahoo director candidates.

Then billionaire investor Carl Icahn proposed his slate and began campaigning hard against the incumbent directors. The presumption was that Icahn's directors would be amenable to a Microsoft deal.

But the meeting in San Jose, Calif., on Friday was a yawn. No Gordon Gekko performances from Icahn, who wrote on his blog Thursday that he wouldn't even be attending.

Agreement reached

Eleven days before the meeting, Icahn and Yahoo reached a détente that diffused the proxy-fight bomb. In exchange for taking his finger off the trigger, Icahn gets a seat on the board for himself and two cronies.

Dispatches from the cavernous ballroom in the Fairmont Hotel described hundreds of empty seats and untouched piles of pastries.

The Yahoo shareholders who attended had several questions about corporate governance, executive and board compensation, human-rights issues, business and strategy.

But they did not seem particularly interested in raking Yahoo's board over the coals for its handling of Microsoft's acquisition proposal, which grabbed much of the attention around both companies for most of the year.

Some shareholders praised Yahoo's board for fending off Microsoft's and Icahn's takeover attempts.

Redmond "octopus"

In the quote of the day, one man, who said he owns 1,200 shares, along with his wife, described Microsoft as "a corporation-destroying, over-the-hill, green-tentacled octopus from Redmond."

Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock went back through the entire Microsoft acquisition saga from Yahoo's point of view.

His version of events elicited a one-line statement from Microsoft before the Yahoo meeting concluded: "Yahoo is attempting to rewrite history yet again with statements that are not supported by the facts.

Public relations between Microsoft and Yahoo have reached a low point this summer and Microsoft's top brass rated the chance of a full acquisition as "essentially negligible."

A partial transaction involving just Yahoo's search assets remains on the table — though Yahoo has rejected two different flavors of that deal already.

It will be interesting to see, in the days and weeks after the shareholder meeting, whether Icahn's weight on the Yahoo board will tilt the scales on a search deal.

Sphere vs. "The Orb"

When Microsoft took the covers off its Sphere last week, the Woody Allen references were unavoidable.

The Sphere, demonstrated at a company event for computer scientists and reporters, expands on the touch-sensing technology Microsoft debuted in its Surface tabletop computer last year.

A camera inside the Sphere detects touches on the surface, allowing people to interact with the device, manipulating photographs or a map of the world projected from within.

"Sleeper," Allen's "nostalgic look at the future," features "The Orb," a round ball that people in 2173 stroke to get high.

We spent several minutes with the Microsoft Sphere, but didn't feel a thing.

Download, a column of news bits, observations and miscellany, is gathered by The Seattle Times technology staff. We can be reached at 206-464-2265 or biztech@seattletimes.com.