Posted on 05/03/2008 5:07:37 PM PDT by HAL9000
BREAKING NEWS: A Microsoft spokesman says the software giant is walking away from its offer to buy out online portal Yahoo, according to the Associated Press.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Bluff or real walk away?
Yahoo made a HUGH mistake...Will go belly-up or BK in the near future. Their last best hope was MS.
I like the many features of Yahoo. Glad it won’t be changing any time soon.
Is this confirmed? Yahoo news is saying they just upped the offer to $31.
Yeah of course I just hear on yahoo news ticker
Yahoo stock will tank Monday morning. Then MS will step in and buy it for a bargin. And shr hldrs get screwed by Yahoo management.
Dow Jones Newswire is saying Microsoft offered up to $33 per share, Yahoo was holding out for $37 minimum.
DJ Newswire says deal is dead.
AP News AlertSEATTLE (AP) -- Microsoft spokesman says the software giant is walking away from its offer to buy out online portal Yahoo
No full article yet.
Microsoft Reveals Withdrawal Of Proposal To Buy Yahoo! - Quick Facts
(RTTNews) - Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) said on Saturday that it has withdrawn its proposal to purchase Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO).
Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer said, "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."
Ballmer added that despite the best efforts, including raising Microsoft's bid by roughly $5 billion, Yahoo! has not moved toward accepting the offer. After careful consideration, Microsoft believes the economics demanded by Yahoo! does not make sense, and it is in the best interests of Microsoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw the proposal.
~ snip ~
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
As a major user of Yahoo I was loathe to think of what would happen to the net if they did in fact manage to make this happen. Let's hope it puts an end to this.
Glad to know your crystal ball works at least.
Mine only says that Yahoo’s stock will go into the crapper Monday and that the shareholders will be PO’d.
Heard it on CNN radio news break just a few minutes ago, Microsoft has withdrawn offer, no figures given. Hopefully Yahoo can repair their business on their own, wasn’t a great idea for a merger anyway, Microsoft should stick to software and forget content.
ha!
TS
Quite the opposite, They wd have saved them.
There were plenty of signs over the past few weeks that Microsoft was having second thoughts about this risky deal.
After Vista, and now this, it's time for Ballmer to announce his retirement plans.
Good. I was worried about what they would do to Flickr, and other services of Yahoo I use. I had just transitioned my company over to Flickr, after MS bought iView (and have done nothing but raise the price), so I was worried. It’s not over yet, but this is good news, for now.
LOL! Microsoft should go into insecticide development, their products are so buggy.
How much is an ad click worth? How much do you click on ads? OTOH, if you work for any decent sized company, can you use anything but the latest versions of office?
If 90% of all users are running your software bugs are sure to be found.
“How much is an ad click worth? How much do you click on ads?”
There’s an entire economy based on ad clicking, or ad visibility - people make money from ads you don’t have to click on. It’s HUGE money, and there are scammers and grifters all over it. If you dig in the legit and illigit aspects of the click economy, you will be *very* surprised how much money is there, and how much of it is scammed.
A blog with a semi-decent amount of traffic, say 25k original hits per day, can make a tidy sum of money from Google ads - at the very least, it will pay for it’s own bandwidth.
“OTOH, if you work for any decent sized company, can you use anything but the latest versions of office?”
Depends on the company’s policy, the competency of it’s IT department, and the skill level of users - Open Office is a fine alternative, and a lot of companies don’t upgrade to the latest and greatest version of Office, just because MS says buy it - in fact, the licensing is what holds many smaller companies back, they can’t afford the latest - the company I work for is refusing to update for a mix of reasons - price being #1.
I’ve seen offices with a mix of Open Office, MS Office, and iWork, and it was fine - generally the troublemaker is MS Office. but there are plenty of workarounds and fixes when they misbehave.
If I owned Yahoo stock I would have wanted the deal to go through. Google is too dominant for Yahoo to compete head to head
One word: Vista
Yahoo stock with drop 30%-35% on Monday. Let the shareholder lawsuits begin. Yang is toast.
Runs great for me, but admittedly I have a great computer.
???
It's THREAT
Microsoft still has two options - a hostile takeover by accululating shares in the open market and/or voting directors to the board that
think MS/Yahoo would be a good deal.
So what exactly has kept Microsoft from succeeding in the Internet space? After all, the investment required to establish a website is minimal and they have a recognized brand name. Oh yes, the brand name. Associated with monopolistic practices, low quality, no customer service. In this particular scheme, MS was trying to buy itself a respected brand name, like GM and Ford bought themselves respected brand names in Europe and promptly screwed them up! In other words, there was nothing stopping MS from competing with Yahoo and Google, except its grudgingly respected brand name. Yahoo will be all right, and maybe Jaguar too under India’s Tata Motors.
I totally agree. Seemingly everything Microsoft has touched in the last two years has turned to shit. I don't know how long it will take, but I believe Microsoft's eventual downfall is at hand. Other companies are running circles around them, and they can barely respond.
Microsoft was late getting on the Internet in the first place. Windows 95 did not ship with a TCP/IP stack. Then Microsoft wasted a few years trying to peddle MSN as an alternative to the Internet, until they figured out that nobody was going to drop the web for MSN.
And more importantly, Yahoo would have ruined Microsoft. MS was to have taken on debt for mthe first time in memory--and for what? It never made sense. It was a bad deal for MSFT shareholders from the start. Look for a nice rally monday.
Steve Balmer ruined Microsoft. They have produced nothing but junk for the last few years. They even tried to delay Blu-ray adoption by their meddling with HD-DVD. They are a company with zero innovation. If they can’t beat ‘em, buy ‘em.
Have you gotten your hands on Microsoft Surface? Coolest device I have ever seen.
bump
Ballmer’s sweetened offer of 33/share was lunacy.
In the 24 months preceding Ballmer’s first offer, YHOO had lost almost 60% of its value - 44 down to 19.
In that same two years the SP500 gained more than 5%, MSFT gained almost 20%, and GOOG gained 30%.
Yes - MSFT has a serious long term problem with its current business model.
But YHOO is a seriously troubled company - right now - and it will continue to decline in the years ahead.
Oh please.
Vista has sold more copies than there are people that use OSX, and who on Earth is going to fault Ballmer because Yahoo didnt want to get bought out?
After Microsoft has been having record quarters recently, I doubt anyone going to be retiring.
Many of those "sales" were coupon giveaways, and a lot of the "sold" copies get uninstalled and replaced with XP. The sales that they are making are mostly for replacements, not new customers like Apple is taking from Microsoft.
Microsoft's best days are over. They reached their peak of power a few years ago, they've been in a long period of stagnation since then, as reflected in their stock chart.
I seem to recall someone said the same thing when Yahoo first rejected the Microsoft offer. Guess what? Yahoo’s stock went UP the following Monday.
I think I read that the Yahoo board was “on-board” with the merger, and it was management that was not. Also, MS should be able to pick up stk on the open market at a lower price than they offered. I feel the majority of stk hldrs knows that if MS really walks away, then Yahoo’s time as a single entity is short.
“Many of those “sales” were coupon giveaways, and a lot of the “sold” copies get uninstalled and replaced with XP.”
Uh huh, I know that “line” too. It’s funny how no one has actual numbers, just stuff they read on a messageboard or stuff their friends told them.
“The sales that they are making are mostly for replacements, not new customers like Apple is taking from Microsoft.”
Yeah, ok... Funny how more people use Windows year after year but yet they are always on the brink of collapse, according to people that, surprise, have a Mac in front of their face.
Good, now I won’t have to find another webportal to use.
Yahoo will drop and we’ll see how much -— Monday
MSFT was nuts to be trying to purchase YHOO for that price anyway. They were basically buying it for 70x this year’s earnings which is nuts since Yahoo hasn’t grown much at all the last few years. I do like Yahoo’s layout and articles to some degree but dislike their search service.
... in China.
Part of the reason MSFT stock price isn't higher is BECAUSE of the Yahoo deal. It should return back to 33-34 soon. It's also half as cheap as APPLE is on a PE ratio for 2009 earnings (13.6 for MSFT vs 28.6 for AAPL). It's on pace for 14% (vs 21% for AAPL) earnings growth this year so I highly doubt it's best days are over as you suggest.
Not this time. Yahoo’s earnings have been flat or dropped in the last 2 years. MSFT’s first offer also wasn’t after Yahoo’s stock had dropped 60%. I expect Yahoo to open around 20/share on Monday, maybe less. MSFT open offer was nearly 80% higher than it’s closing price the day before the offer.
Apple understands Motorola's failures better than MOT does, especially when it comes to innovation. No company is more focused on innovation than Apple.
Apple's biggest challenge is managing their growth rate while maintaining their high standards of quality and good profit margins.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.