Viant's poison pill also bolsters its other anti-takeover defense, a board of directors with staggered terms, which makes it difficult for bidders to eliminate an entire board and replace it with supportive directors. No complaints Since the shareholder-rights plan has been put in place, a few shareholders have called with questions but no complaints, Bienfait said. Even portal giant Yahoo recently adopted a poison pill. No one wants to do a hostile takeover. There are social and economic ramifications of doing this.
Hostile action varies in degree.
But those kinds of moves can lead to negotiated agreements in which a target company either agrees to be purchased by the original bidder or seeks a white knight to buy the company. In the past five years there have been about 200 attempted hostile takeovers across all industries, investment bankers say. That ratio is consistent for the technology sector but on a much smaller scale. In the past decade there have been only nine hostile takeover attempts against tech companies. Another successful hostile takeover was IBM's buyout of software maker Lotus.