Bloomberg View – Never has techland felt the influence of activist investors so acutely, with a Who’s Who of hedge-fund luminaries transforming the investing landscape. Jesse Cohn of Elliott Management is pushing EMC to spin off VMWare. Dan Loeb reshaped Yahoo’s board and installed Marissa Mayer as chief executive, and now Starboard Value wants to break up the company. Value Act’s Jeffrey Ubben pushed Steve Ballmer out of Microsoft. And Carl Icahn has been an agitator in the industry for the past seven years.
Lots of public companies have responded by shoring up weaknesses before they attract unwanted attention and creating plans for when the hedge-fund guys call.
