Microsoft Withdraws Proposal to Acquire Yahoo!, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!
Microsoft Corp. today announced that it has withdrawn its proposal to acquire Yahoo! Inc.
REDMOND, Wash., May 3, 2008 ? Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) today announced that it has withdrawn its proposal to acquire Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO).
?We continue to believe that our proposed acquisition made sense for Microsoft, Yahoo! and the market as a whole. Our goal in pursuing a combination with Yahoo! was to provide greater choice and innovation in the marketplace and create real value for our respective stockholders and employees,? said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft.
?Despite our best efforts, including raising our bid by roughly $5 billion, Yahoo! has not moved toward accepting our offer. After careful consideration, we believe the economics demanded by Yahoo! do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Microsoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal,? said Ballmer.
?We have a talented team in place and a compelling plan to grow our business through innovative new services and strategic transactions with other business partners. While Yahoo! would have accelerated our strategy, I am confident that we can continue to move forward toward our goals,? Ballmer said.
?We are investing heavily in new tools and Web experiences, we have dramatically improved our search performance and advertiser satisfaction, and we will continue to build our scale through organic growth and partnerships,? said Kevin Johnson, Microsoft president for platforms and services.
Below is the text of the letter from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang.
May 3, 2008
Mr. Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
Dear Jerry:
After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.
I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!?s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal. I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter, and I especially appreciate the time that you have invested personally. I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible.
I am disappointed that Yahoo! has not moved towards accepting our offer. I first called you with our offer on January 31 because I believed that a combination of our two companies would have created real value for our respective shareholders and would have provided consumers, publishers, and advertisers with greater innovation and choice in the marketplace. Our decision to offer a 62 percent premium at that time reflected the strength of these convictions.
Source: Microsoft
Trackbacks & Pingbacks
- Pingback by WebmasterRadio.FM Coverage of the Microsoft / Yahoo! (non?) Merger | WebmasterRadio.FM Blog on May 7, 2008 @ 8:23 am
Comments
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Yahoo resources would have been great for improving Live (one of the rare Microsoft things that I actually like), too bad they didn’t make it. Combination is always stronger than competition. Let’s hope they will add something else – just please not Google…
on May 6, 2008