News Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo! for £22.4bn

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/02/01/microsoft_offers_to_buy_yahoo_for_44_6bn_dollars/1

Microsoft has said that it has formally offered to buy Yahoo! for a massive £22.4 billion - if the deal goes through it'd be the biggest in Internet history.


!!!!!

 

22£ billions for a advertising plattform and a inferior unused search engine?

what idiot at ms thought yahoo would be worth that much?

the news they publish are copy pastes from reuters and other media agencies (just like the stuff on any news website / newspaper / tv), the search engine, anyone ever used it? no. sure, there is some advertiment income from the add's that are plastered all over, but i dont think that makes it worth more than one Quid.

 

Can I have 22.4 Billion please?

Could be a good move. The two nearest competitiors to Google teaming up to take it on? Should be some interesting results!

 

Unused? Holy wrongness batman. Yahoo is massive.

 

yahoo is used for the free email function which has plenty of ad's that generate income, but what else is used?

the search function has how much market share compared to google? prolly less than linux compared to windows.

 

I wouldn't call about 20% of all net searches 'not used'. Yea ok so they are declining massively compared to Google's 50% or so share. Combine MS and Yahoo and they still don't beat Google afaik so I'm not sure if the competition commission will decline, if anything they need to combine to take on the might of Google.
Still, £22.4bn is just a crazy amount of money that I just can't quantify.

 

The amount puts AMD's £2.8 billion ATI buyout in a bit of a hole in comparison

 

I thought Yahoo was part of BT (British Telecom)
Thats quiet a lot of money, obviously Windows is selling well enough for MS to warrant a large purchase, i was hoping though that MS would by Switzerland (Zero Punctuation Halo 3 Review heh) haha

Sam

 

BT & Yahoo have a partnership with regards to broadband offerings, but they're not owned by BT.

Apparently the price MS is offering ($31 per share) is a whopping 62% premium on Yahoo's Jan31 closing price. Looks like Microsoft is serious about this...

 

I know tons of people that use the personalized home pages actually. Far more than use google.com/ig from what I've seen. For whatever reason, my dad goes to MSN all the time - and not by accident, as he uses Safari. I really just live in Google Reader now as the only non-feed stuff I have on my Google home page is on my iPhone. I think the search market is totally owned by Google, but for no-search-required, in-your-face content, both MSN and Y! dominate Google. Probably for the same reason in both cases - Google goes for clean and relevant to keep you coming back, while MSN and Yahoo throw as much on the page as possible in hopes they can keep you on their domain for as long as possible. Both are valid approaches as far as revenue streams go, but target the market very differently.

 

my friends says:

"MS is an amoeba"

 

Not only searches, but Yahoo owns:

Delicious
Flickr
etc.

 

Not to mention the massive user base standing behind Yahoo! ever since...

But it's wort around 1/3 of what Google is worth? Errr... somebody else smells that internet hype again that already blew up once a few years ago? They're just going insane about whatever is on the internet nowadays IMHO.

 

Noooooo

Sigh, i dont want to change email providers

 

you hit the nail on the head. When people read this they don't think of all the other sites that fall under the yahoo umbrella. i agree this is kinda high but not completely insane considering the user base yahoo has when you include all the sites they own.

 

Sony uses Flickr for the PS Blog content... if this goes through it looks like Sony will be switching blogs.

Yahoo doesnt own wordpress do they?

 

Earlier in a MS boardroom... "Damn that Google's doing alright we should get a piece of that action <rummages in back pocket> yeah this should do £22.400.000.000 offer them that!"

Can you really go wrong when you've the money to buy pretty much anything you want?

Some countries would like a GDP that high!

 

hah, i don't even know what those are o_o

 

once this goes through, does it mean we can refer to them as Yacrosoft? ¥$ for short?
looks like microsoft might finally get a piece of the asian action, i know Yahoo is quite big in Japan and China (no penis jokes please )

 

Yahoo whores their partnerships like no tomorrow. They're with Rogers here.

Still, though. "In the best interest of the shareholders?" being a part of Microsoft makes it hard to lose.