Looks like the boys at Microsoft have finally walked away from Yahoo! after Jerry Yang tried to get them to revive their last takeover bid of US$47.5 billion.
Yahoo said Microsoft “unequivocally” rejected the notion of buying the entire company in a meeting held Sunday.
Now what?
Well, the company’s annual meeting is August 1st where they will face the wrath of activist investor Carl Icahn who wants Jerry Yang’s head and the entire Yahoo! Board replaced. NOTE: Link is to a nice TechCrunch posting reminding us that Jerry Yang’s salary is only US$1/year.
Shares fell 10% on this news to US$23.52/share.
Yahoo! is now looking for help from arch rival Google who will now serve Adwords on the Yahoo! site. This may help Yahoo! in the short-term but also signs over the rights to global search domination to Google once and for all. Yahoo! says this deal could generate up to US$450 million in revenues for the first year and up to US$800 million per year moving forward. However, lots of antitrust hurdles to overcome before this deal gets signed.
Our good friends at Alibaba Group can relax this weekend but I am sure they will sleep with one eye open just in case Ballmer has a last card to play.
