Microsoft Looking Forward to Post-Failed Merger Makeup Sex
by John Paczkowski
Posted on July 25, 2008 at 1:47 PM PT
Looks like Microsoft’s on-again, off-again, on-again pursuit of Yahoo is off-again, this time for good. Perhaps. Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell told Microsoft investors assembled for an annual day of presentations Thursday that “the chances of us buying Yahoo on a full acquisition basis are so small that they are essentially negligible. … We took the view and we still take the view that Yahoo is essentially a declining asset. We made a credibly generous bid with a very high premium because we were looking for speed.”
And, as Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer noted later on in the presentation, negotiations between the two companies were anything but speedy.
“It is a little weird,” he said. “We had an offer out that was a 100-percent premium on the operating business of the company, and there wasn’t a serious price negotiation … until three months later.” And then, to make it perfectly clear that Microsoft is no longer interested in acquiring Yahoo, Ballmer added: “We’re done, we can move on.“
Or can they? Because to that definitive statement on the Yahoo (YHOO) issue, Ballmer quickly added this caveat: “Does that mean that nobody will ever talk to anybody again? I suspect that the answer to that question is also no. It’s a long time and a big world.”
