April 1, 2008

Sunnyvale, California

Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang told reporters today that the board of directors of Yahoo! Inc. had met earlier that morning and agreed to the sale of the company at a price of USD 66.6 Billion. Yang took the opportunity to defuse speculation about what this move means for the company.

Said Yang, “Honestly, it’s not that big a deal. The truth is that we used to show up at the company HQ every day, see that Yahoo! sign up there and get excited. But recently that just hasn’t been the case. I must be getting old or something. Anyway, I figured, ‘they want it? They can have it. I’m stinking rich anyway, why should I have to work?'”

One of the conditions of sale was that the Yahoo! name be changed.

“Let’s just admit it,” explained Yang. “It’s a stupid name. It was fun for, like, 20 minutes. Then we all sobered up and realised we felt like dorks whenever we told someone where we worked.”

Yang then took the opportunity to unveil Yahoo!’s new name: Meh… Its logo, Yang said, will be a giant emoticon consisting of the ‘8’, ‘-‘ and ‘/’ characters. When pressed by reporters, he admitted that it would not be easier to spell, and would still cause problems with grammar checkers.

“On the bright side,” he added, “we might finally be able to fix this, now that we’re part of… Meh… Microsoft.”

Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, was not present at the press conference, due to a ‘minor’ chair-related injury. He instead released a taped message stating his satisfaction with the negotiations, which ended with a cryptic reminder to Yahoo! employees that their families would be safe, now that they’d shown some sense. Yang would not speculate about the comment’s meaning.