QOTD

“I think it is an excellent deal.”

– Investor-agitator Carl Icahn on the Microsoft-Yahoo search advertising partnership that replaced the Microsoft-Yahoo merger for which he once pined

“This is the one that stuns me, that people haven’t figured it out,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer this morning in Redmond at the company’s annual Financial Analyst Meeting, truly surprised at Yahoo investors’ negative reception to the Microsoft-Yahoo deal. How to convince them otherwise? Not to fear, Steve! The Microsoft-Yahoo propaganda machine is in full swing and has already produced its first talking-points docs.

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Wall Street is finally having its say about the newly announced Microsoft-Yahoo deal, and while opinions are mixed, there is some consensus on who got the better end of the deal: Microsoft. Seems the Street would have much preferred the “boatloads of money” Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz once said she’d demand for a search deal than the “boatloads of value” she claims to have given them this morning. After the jump, a roundup of analysts’ notes issued about the deal.

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Once again for old time’s sake, the Yahoo-Microsoft soap opera in Digital Daily intros, with apologies to Steven Spielberg, Mel Blanc, Queen, Neil Diamond, Barbra Streisand, Tallulah Bankhead, Marlene Dietrich and the entire cast of “The Sound of Music.”

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Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz says the company’s newly inked search advertising pact “comes with boatloads of value for Yahoo,” but you wouldn’t know it to look at the company’s share price. Yahoo’s shares slipped into the mud on the deal’s announcement, declining nearly seven percent to $16.07 in early trading.

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Microsoft’s new Bing Internet search engine may have exceeded the growth of its rivals in June, but it didn’t do much for the company’s overall share of the search market. Bing grew faster than Yahoo and Google during the month. But sadly for Microsoft, it lost market share.

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You can’t overtake a market in a month, particularly one dominated by Google. But you can certainly chip away a small foothold. Which is what Microsoft managed to do with its new search engine, Bing, last month. According to StatCounter, Microsoft’s share of the market grew to 8.23 percent in June, up from the 7.8 percent share it held prior to Bing’s launch.

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Microsoft may have failed in its bid to acquire Yahoo last year, but it hasn’t failed in its bid to acquire some of the company’s talent. Between November 2008 and March 2009, Redmond hired away five Yahoo veterans. Now comes word that it’s picked up three more.

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More sad data points in Microsoft’s Sisyphean battle for the search market. ComScore released May 2009 core search volume and market share metrics for the U.S. this afternoon and they show what search metrics always seem to show these days: Google’s share of the domestic market growing at the expense of its rivals.

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On stage at our All Things Digital conference last month, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said that a search deal with Microsoft would require a “boatload of money,” and an outright acquisition even more. It doesn’t require a great feat of augury to see that an agreement between the two–at least at this time–isn’t that likely, as a number of analysts have recently noted.

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What Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz lacked in the way of salty language at today’s Bank of America U.S. Technology conference, she more than made up for in cutting remarks about Microsoft. Apparently, she doesn’t believe Yahoo’s salvation lies in a search deal with the software giant. Doesn’t think much of its new search engine Bing, either.

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When Assistant Attorney General Christine Varney said she plans to take a more aggressive approach to antitrust enforcement, she wasn’t kidding. Under her leadership the US Department of Justice has opened an investigation into the recruiting practices at Google, Apple, Yahoo, and Genentech, among others.

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Yahoo announced some updates to its homepages today–mobile and Web both. Designed to make them more personally relevant to their users, the pages are more customizable than they’ve been before. The release in full, after the jump.

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2009 has proven a lucrative year for departing Yahoo CFO Blake Jorgensen. Sure, he’s leaving Yahoo, but he’s doing so with a $1.8 million lump-sum severance payment, according to a company SEC filing. This in addition to the $250,000 bonus he was awarded earlier this year.

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Here’s further confirmation that Time Warner is looking to spin off AOL. In an SEC filing Monday, the company said it is seeking to amend debt agreements that restrict it from unloading the struggling business. Coming as it does after the hiring of Tim Armstrong, a former Google executive, as AOL CEO and chairman, the move would seem to suggest that Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes has given up on the idea of an AOL merger with Yahoo and is pushing ahead full-bore with a spinoff.

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