Microsoft Says No Deal to Yahoo

      by Wyatt Walter

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made a public statement today stating that the company is no longer interested in a deal with Yahoo. The two companies have been going back and forth about the issue dating back as early as May of 2006. Yahoo received a large offer in January of this year for $45 billion or $31 per share. Yahoo turned the offer down and sought other opportunities. Potential deals between Yahoo and Google and Yahoo and AOL both surfaced in the interim, but both deals seem to have fallen through.

Just a couple of days ago, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang stated that he thought “the best thing for Microsoft to do is to buy Yahoo.” Yahoo’s stock closed today at $12.20, barely a third of its value in the deal proposed by Microsoft that Yahoo shot down. Ballmer’s response to Yang’s statement went like this: “Look, we made an offer, we made another offer. It was clear that Yahoo didn’t want to sell the business to us, and we moved on.”

Microsoft wanted to purchase Yahoo’s business as a way to get a jump start on its battle to contest Google for the search market share. Microsoft and Yahoo, however, seem to be losing ground on Google on market share. According to seoconsultants.com, Yahoo and Microsoft both lost around 3% of their market share from the end of 2007 through October. Google swept up that market share jumping just over 6% over that same time span. Sadly enough, that 3% that Microsoft lost was almost half of its market share. Google seems to be eating up the market and there’s nothing anyone else has been able to do about it. According to Alexa, Yahoo does have the most visited site on the Internet. Also, Yahoo recently picked up Zimbra which looks like it could be one of the biggest rivals to Microsoft Exchange, so the future of Yahoo isn’t entirely bleak assuming they can stop the bleeding and pull out some profits.

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Filed under News, Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Nov 7th, 2008