Following a popular and well known strategy in the world of software development, "Dancing Steve" Ballmer announced today (2/1/2008) that M$ will offer $4.6B to purchase Yahoo. M$ "will bid $31 per share, representing a 62 percent premium to Yahoo's closing stock price Thursday," said Steve. Ballmer said that M$ will offer sizeable incentives to key engineers and other employees to stay with the company.<br><br>In other news, Terry Semel announced on Thursday that he is stepping down as Yahoo's non-executive chairman, six months after handing over his CEO title to Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang. Yang announced that beleagered Yahoo is trimming 1000 jobs.<br><br>Hard to imagine the shareholders will turn this one down. Another company assimilated.<br><br>Who serves his fellows, is of his fellows greatest - Chingachgook (by legend) <br><br>Scout

Yahoo! says:<br>Under terms of the...d half of 2008.<br><br>That is a huge premium. MS must be seriously aching to assimil...uhm...acquire Yahoo. And they seem to have a lot loose change to throw around.<br><br><br><br><br><br>

dang it, dang it, dang it. i had YHOO entered and almost bought shares yesterday when i saw it down around $19/share. dang.<br><br>this is huge as Microsoft was competing very poorly with Google and this puts Microsoft right in the mix of things. <br><br>look for Google shares to fall a bit today.<br><br>

I would be interested to find out what MS's plans are for the other Yahoo properties like Flickr, MyBlogLog and others. I actually use some of those services. I hope they don't get poo-pooed to make way for some MS junk pile competing product.<br><br>I guess this was bound to happen eventually. Yahoo was getting its arse kicked by Google. And the advertising revenue Yahoo has was probably what interested MS along with the search stuff. I never cared for Yahoo's search engine though. Because it was a "directory" instead of a search engine, the results were never on par with Google.<br><br>

now THAT is a big merger ...this should be very interesting to follow<br><br>zweisoft<br>

Yeah, that would be by far Microsoft's biggest acquisition so far. Last year they bought a company called aQuantive (never heard, personally) for 6 billion dollars, which is their biggest now, so this would indeed be huge.<br><br>Also, will we be seeing Apple teaming up more closely with Google in the future?<br><br>

Take a trip down Memory Lane. Remember? It was just a short 14 years ago that it all started.<br><br>Microsoft launched Live Search in March 2006 and in two years it has made very little impact on the web. In fact, it has been highly criticized by the constant changes and redesigns to its interface by its users as well as competing search providers.<br><br>In two years Microsoft has only managed to garner 9 percent of all searches made online. Yahoo! on the other hand has a 22 percent share of searches. <br><br>44 billion dollars will immediately launch Microsoft into second place, behind Google's 58 percent. I believe Microsoft's numbers will stagnate while Google's will continue to inch upwards.<br><br><br><br><br>M i c h a e l (OFI)

That sucks. I've used MyYahoo as my homepage for as long as its been around. Can't wait to see how Microsoft turns it into garbage.<br><br>

Me too, Trog. MS will probably screw it up and I'll have to find something else.<br><br>[color:red]&#63743;</font color=red> [color:orange]&#63743;</font color=orange> [color:yellow]&#63743;</font color=yellow> [color:green]&#63743;</font color=green> [color:blue]&#63743;</font color=blue> [color:purple]&#63743;</font color=purple>

I've used a Yahoo email address for every online business transaction I've ever made. Nothing gives me more comfort than knowing that all the power of Microsoft security will soon have all those records. <br><br>