Yahoo Keeps Whistling in the Dark

Spencer felt right at home last week at the Oakland Coliseum, where the Superfan Feline celebrated the start of baseball season by watching his personal favorite Boston Red Sox beat the Athletics.

It looked like the majority of the fans in the mostly empty stadium were transplanted New Englanders, who, like the Truant Tabby, were playing hooky from work for an early chance to cheer the defending world champions to victory.

But after the game, his attention turned from box scores to trolling for tips as the Katt checked in with his legion of Bay Area tipsters. The word in Silicon Valley is that Yahoo is earning full credit from fans for bravely soldiering on in the shadow of Microsoft’s now-hostile takeover bid.

Yahoo is making a great show of following through on its product plans with last week’s introduction of OneSearch 2.0, which gives users of Web-enabled phones the ability to perform voice-search queries.

While the new voice-search features probably just make Yahoo even more attractive to Microsoft, Silicon Valley watchers are wondering when Microsoft will try to force a proxy vote.

The New York Post reported March 27 that Microsoft is not having an easy time finding “dissident” but otherwise independent director candidates willing to join the Microsoft slate. By law, Microsoft can’t nominate its own executives to the slate, so it has to nominate people who are willing to seek election and then vote in favor of the Microsoft buyout.

The theory goes that many potential nominees don’t want to ruin long-standing relationships with Yahoo and the rest of the Silicon Valley tech community by participating in a hostile takeover. They would rather see both sides negotiate a friendly buyout agreement.

The Sagacious Gato expects Microsoft will be ready to present its own slate of candidates whenever Yahoo announces the date for its next annual meeting.

While gadding about Silicon Valley , the Peripatetic Puss heard that the great granddaddy of all computers, a full-scale model of British mathematician Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, will be transported from London to go on display May 10 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View , Calif. The engine weighs five tons and contains more than 8,000 bronze, cast iron and steel parts.Then one of Spencer’s favorite Valley geeks pinged him with squib about Kristy Hinze, a 27-year-old Australian model who has grabbed a lot of eyeballs with appearances in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue and the Victoria’s Secret catalog. But Silicon Valley geeks are gabbing about the identity of one of her friends. Hinze told Australian Women’s Weekly that she was instantly attracted to her current boyfriend, Jim Clark, 63, because “he’s handsome and has so much charisma-and he’s so funny.” Clark is also a billionaire and a co-founder of Netscape, Silicon Graphics and other companies.