Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo Takeover Offer

mksmac writes "According to the KOMO TV Website, Microsoft has withdrawn its bid for Yahoo after presenting them with an increased offer that was subsequently declined by Yahoo. Frankly, this seems like a smarter decision on Microsoft's part, but I'd like to hear how other people feel about the deal. Should Microsoft have walked away, pressured Yahoo via a hostile takeover or sweetened the pot until Yahoo gave in?" For those who prefer it, the NYT also has coverage, and the story is also at news.com, among many others. I like the Beeb's version as well. And for the Microsoft-centric explanation of why the courtship is over, see Steve Balmer's letter to Jerry Yang.

Re:My question is...

[j0nb0y]

Where did you get that idea?

The general consensus on the street seemed to be that Microsoft was offering *too much* money... which is why Microsoft stock dropped when the offer was first announced...

I'm not a big fan of Microsoft, but it really looked to me like they wanted Yahoo. It was Yahoo's executives who didn't want the deal to go through.

Maybe I just watch too much CNBC.

Cringely was right, MSFT wasn't serious

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080215_004309.html [pbs.org] This thing went on too long to be credible. I don't respect MSFT, but don't for a minute think that its management is as incompetent as it would have to be to buy a company that has so little to offer in the larger scope of things. This has been a great way to make MSFT look powerful, and YHOO look like a weak patsy - which is exactly what YHOO is.

...and Ballmer wrote as such.

[game kid]

...

We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a "hostile" bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons:

• First, it would fundamentally undermine Yahoo!'s own strategy and long-term viability by encouraging advertisers to use Google as opposed to your Panama paid search system. This would also fragment your search advertising and display advertising strategies and the ecosystem surrounding them. This would undermine the reliance on your display advertising business to fuel future growth.

...

No need to speculate on what Ballmer has all but confirmed. :)

Re:My question is...

[CodeBuster]

I fail to see why MS would want to compete with Google so much

Google is earning economic rent [wikipedia.org] through their strong franchise business in search and online advertising. There is no way that they are not going to attract competitors. Microsoft is in the technology business too, so it is difficult to explain to your shareholders why you are not trying to capture a piece of that lucrative market for yourself, especially when you seem well placed to compete for a share of the spoils. Microsoft is trying to earn the best possible return for their shareholders and that means competing for a share of the market in which Google is earning strong profits going forward.

Re:MS, you lucked out

[Anonymous Coward]

Surprisingly yes, budget is a limiting factor in a lot of things at Microsoft. They can't or won't pay the premium needed to keep really top notch developers around, so their staff is made up of "company men" with no perspective on reality, mediocre developers who slipped through the hiring process, and the small contingent of good developers who just haven't gotten pissed off enough to leave yet. It's a problem a lot of companies seem to have when the stock payoff days are over but the management still buys into the myth of the company's infallibility.

Re:My question is...

[Maury Markowitz]

> which is why Microsoft stock dropped when the offer was first announced...

The target's stock always goes up and the acquirer's always goes down. That's because the former is being made an offer at a premium over their current price, while the later is typically taking on debt or diluting their stock (the later in this case). It had nothing at all to do with the details of the deal.

> Microsoft, but it really looked to me like they wanted Yahoo

Yeah, but why? Really, why does MS believe it's future lies in advertising? They've never made money this way in the past, and the ads I've seen certainly don't instill confidence.

Maury

Re:Credibility lost?

[Maury Markowitz]

> a merger with Yahoo would have been horrific for both companies

I always thought so too, but let me assure you, the rest of the finance world disagreed. Completely.

There's a certain momentum to mergers that has absolutely nothing to do with the companies involved. It has to do with cash flows and balance sheets. It doesn't make a difference what happens AFTER the deal is closed. That's the distant future, science fiction.

MS had cash, they needed to spend cash, this was a vaguely profitable company to spend it on. Game over.

Maury

Re:My question is...

[HuguesT]

Actually they offered $33 per share, which amounts to $47.5 billions. Yahoo wanted $53 billions, the greedy bastards.

Printing? Ever heard of Latex?

[twitter]

Smitty_each_one strays far off the topic of M$'s embarrassing failure to acquire Yahoo to say:

quality printing (booklets and stuff) is not exactly a strong suit of Free Software. Which is kind of ironic, as text handling was one of the strong suits of the early Unix.

Which is ill informed. GNU/Linux distributions have been using post script as the basis for printing for a long time. This is the same basis every other professional printing house uses, so you should get world class printing from free software. There's are ample software to back that up on the user side from Latex to Open Office and lots of stuff in between. Open Office copies the functionality of Word to a fault. More reasonable word processors like Kword and Lyx are also available. There's also a wealth of graphic design software for things like posters and newspapers - inkscape and scribus spring to mind. For writing papers, books and technical journals there's still no beating Latex. You can find a template for just about anything and there are all sorts of easy to use editors, Lyx, Kile, Emacs and so on and so forth.

Re:My question is...

[target]

Google and Apple have been fairly chummy for a couple of years now -- look closely and you'll notice that the iPhone ships with only Apple and Google apps, nobody else was even invited to the party.

That's sort of interesting until you actually take the close look you asked for and discover that the iPhone ships with Yahoo mail and search as built-in options. Yahoo mail was even the default option for non-Apple-based mail.

So yeah, they may be allies, but your case seems to be somewhat lacking actual facts. Which is fine, this is slashdot.

Re:Printing? Ever heard of Latex?

[willyhill]

You are doing a disservice to free software when you sit there and claim that publishing professionals can replace their commercial software tools with a hodgepodge of immature applications that have about as much user base and corporate acceptance as Microsoft Bob. PostScript is *not* a standard used in the printing process *anywhere* nowadays, it's fairly obvious that you are just making that up or you are still stuck in the 90s. Look up PDF/X and JDF and educate yourself.

I would be happy if there was something even remotely similar to the Adobe design/publishing stack on Linux, but the reality is there just isn't. Mentioning LaTex and Emacs (WTF) on the same paragraph as your claim of desktop publishing superiority is laughable at best.

Next time, just use one of your other eight accounts so people think you just got here and have no idea what you're talking about. They might be more lenient with the mod points.