Imagine if Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang had penned "f*k off" to each other. Yahoo!'s shareholders may be salting their language after yesterday's 15% stock drop, Yang is playing it as cool as Balmer, but over in pharma land, we had a Schering-Plough executive dropping the F-bomb on his Merck counterpart over the Vytorin mess.

Merck CEO Dick Clark probably heard the crash of his own cymbals when he called the companies' joint marketing of the drug "well-managed." To his credit, he stopped the plate-spinning there. Clark now holds Merck, and not media-hype, accountable for the Vytorin mess, and wants Merck and Big Pharma to fix "a trust deficit." Two of his peers--Pfizer CEO Jeff Kindler and GlaxoSmithKline chief Andrew Witty--have also acknowledged the rot in pharma corporate culture. Says Witty: "Pharma's equilibrium is shattered."

The ink blot keeps spreading for Merck, which just won a symbolic "silver medal" for having the "worst news week" following the rejection of two experimental therapies and an FDA warning.

No surprise here--the acquisition rumors started two months ago--but Deutsche Telekom AG (tough negotiators, having once faced them in strategic partnership discussions, but probably a tad more humble these days in the face of declining revenues) may be targeting Sprint Nextel. If combined with DT's tepid acquiree T-Mobile USA (only fun there was Catherine Zeta-Jones), the newco would be the biggest wireless provider in the U.S., but like Microsoft-Yahoo!, there are anti-competitive hurdles, technology integration barriers, and other headaches.

Perhaps a white knight will emerge to lop off Nextel's head, the gremlin that's been tugging on Sprint’s wires ever since the merger.

Jeff Heilman

5/6/08