In reviewing one of my early comments about Yahoo I wrote:

• YHOO: No. By any metric you choose P/E, P/S, Price to book value, price to cash flow its expensive, ROIC stinks --there is none, and no dividend. Positive notes: almost no debt, ROE is good. Profit margins are great and might be sustainable. But this is another guessing game. Soooo what about YAHOO - anybody home?

Sometimes the difficulty is not so much defining your goals but negotiating the treacherous path to get there. In the case of management at MSFT, YHOO, and AOL they may see the benefits that others see in breaking out in a new form, slashing overlapping departments and getting under performing ones off the books but they cannot make the compromises necessary about valuation to make it happen. It might be big egos, or just inertia but the best they seem to be able to muster is a tweeking of the system with what seems like dubious results in the case of all three.

Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the principal for design and research at an architecture & planning firm. He writes the columns Chasing Value and Serious Money. DISCLOSURE: I own shares of TWX.