Microsoft Offer To Buy Yahoo! - Nothing On Techmeme
So, when I heard that Microsoft had put in an offer for Yahoo!, I went to Techmeme to see what people were saying - this would be the biggest deal in recent Internet history, after all. As of 11.55am London time, Techmeme, has not a single story about this. That can’t be right, surely?
I’m sure it will be the top story soon enough, but I didn’t expect Techmeme to be quite so “out of the loop”. Ho hum…
The offer looks pretty good to me, by the way. $44.6B or $31 per share, which is a 62% premium to the share price before MS made the offer. I’d expect shareholders would want to accept it.
Asam Bashir wrote:
Sounds like it’s a hostile take-over and Yahoo going to fight it, as well EU regulators. MS is at the end of the day a convicted criminal company that’s been prosecuted and found guilty in several courts of law. Can’t see Google taking it sitting down either.
If this bid fails, and rumors are suggesting it will, it will damage MS in the long term as it’s basically an admission that they’ve messed up their search and ad strategy badly - nice one Orang-utan man Balmer and Gates, one more last cock-up before they both leave…
Posted 02 Feb 2008 at 4:41 pm ¶
Asam Bashir wrote:
Hey why doesn’t Sun by it, have they got enough in coppers?
Posted 02 Feb 2008 at 4:44 pm ¶
simon wrote:
Sun way too small, and not a good fit.
Difficulty is for those that want to bid against MS, is that Yahoo! is probably worth more to MS than any other company. So who would pay more to acquire the company?
Now… the only wrinkle on that is that there may be all sorts of companies that don’t want to see Yahoo! get bought by MS. And this is the kind of situation where people start paying more for companies than they’re worth.
The list of companies that could buy Yahoo! are MS competitors that have a market cap north of $100B (includes Apple); and Google (but anti-trust issues for the GOOG buying Yahoo!). Also, companies that want to own big destination sites, like News Corp. And maybe even a mobile phone company or two.
But still, all these guys have to be prepared to outbid MS… and MS has deep pockets.
Be really interesting to see how this one works out… The top-level view of a combined Microsoft-Yahoo! is pretty interesting - gives them an amazing position in: hosted e-mail, instant messaging and photosharing… and, most importantly of all, puts them in a significantly better position to compete with Google in search and advertising (especially search advertising).
Posted 02 Feb 2008 at 10:06 pm ¶
Asam Bashir wrote:
http://www.macrumors.com/2008/02/04/apple-and-others-considering-bids-for-yahoo/
Apple does have a lot stashed away in the bank, not enough for Yahoo, but it’s been sitting on that money for ages and could do with buying in some more teams. But I can’t see who the other partners would be and how they wouldn’t manage to get in Google’s way.
Posted 05 Feb 2008 at 4:30 pm ¶