Yahoo! Rejects Microsoft's Offer, Says 'Still An Option'

mikkl666 writes "In response to an open letter from Steve Ballmer, Yahoo! posted a press release claiming that Microsoft's offer 'substantially undervalues Yahoo!' and is therefore not in the best interest of the company. They also bemoan that the letter 'mischaracterizes the nature of our discussions' and that the threat to make an offer directly to the shareholders is 'counterproductive and inconsistent with the stated objective of a friendly transaction'. Nevertheless, they explicitly point out that a transaction with Microsoft is still an option, but only if they are willing to pay 'a price that fully recognizes the value of Yahoo!'"

Comments

crack smoker

[timmarhy]

MS are offering 2x the going share price. what secret pot of gold does yahoo managment think they have that's worth so much?

oh and he must be pretty dense to think "friendly negotiations" are still an option if MS goes to the shareholders directly.

Re:crack smoker

[Mongoose Disciple]

Microsoft only wants the userbase and the brand, not the products. If Microsoft were to acquire Yahoo!, all their technology (Apache, Oracle, MySQL, PHP, Java, etc running on top of Linux and BSD) would be replaced by Windows servers running IIS. That would make most of the Yahoo! engineers redundant.


Ok, so devil's advocate / tinfoil hat time.

I'm not exactly going to predict this because, come on, Microsoft, but I could sort of see them leaving Yahoo! alone technologically, at least in the short term.

Let's assume there's some viable evil reason for Microsoft to want expertise with PHP/MySQL/etc. in their stable. Microsoft basically cannot grow something like that organically from within. You can't create Microsoft MySQL without essentially admitting there's something wrong with SQL Server, etc.

But you could plausibly buy Yahoo, point to the past migration nightmares of Hotmail, and say that you were wisely letting Yahoo continue with their current technologies due to those experiences.

Re:The real question is why?

[Enderandrew]

Yahoo's web-services run on Apache servers, and are often developed with open source software in mind.

I can't imagine that would continue if Microsoft bought them out. And most of the in-house developers would have to learn asp real quick, or be out of jobs.