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Email Alerts Halt Transfer of Google Stock Options

Colin Colehour [PersonRank 10]

Saturday, April 21, 2007
17 years ago3,204 views

The San Jose Mercury news which is one of the large newspapers in Silicon Valley has an article about how Google's transferable stock options has been shut down. Typically these get shut down right before something big happens. The example they talked about in the article, was this could occur if Google were about to buy Yahoo. That was just an example and not something that is going to happen. But I want to know what really is about to happen to cause the employee stock options program to be halted?

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_5720815

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Oops, they article seems to be reg-only...

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Colin, read the article again. The general idea is: "Google workers WILL be notified if something's up." But they weren't notified.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Thanks Ionut for the copy. Snipped:

<<But the coolest stuff is often reserved for Google employees. And they're about to get access to a killer tool, otherwise known as the "supersecret Google is about to buy Yahoo" alert.

Technically, this is an e-mail that informs all 12,230-plus Googlers that the in-house market for transferable stock options has been shut down.

In reality, it means something really, really big is about to happen to the company that could affect the stock price.

"For example, if Google decides it wants to buy Yahoo, that's a really big deal," said David Sobota, Google's senior corporate counsel. "We wouldn't want to disclose that to the world the first time Eric Schmidt comes to a handshake agreement with Terry Semel about it, because that could disrupt the negotiation process." (...)

"If we are only shutting down this program when there are big deals in the making, won't shutting it down actually cause us harm, because people would realize we are about to buy Microsoft?" one employee asked.>>

So I agree with Ionut it sounds like Mercury News is just reporting on this issue in general, and there's no alert of this kind which was sent out (?). What I don't really understand is this sentence:

<<And they're about to get access to a killer tool, otherwise known as the "supersecret Google is about to buy Yahoo" alert.>>

About to get access? And what tool? And how will it solve the problem of potential leaks?

/pd [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

the actual transscaript was filed.. here

http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312507085710/dfwp.htm

ZZ [PersonRank 3]

17 years ago #

Whoa.. bump..

Colin Colehour [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Woops. Sorry about that. I shouldn't have submitted something so late at night.

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