Microsoft announced today that it has made a formal proposal to Yahoo’s Board of Directors. The bid is valued at $44.6 billion in cash and stock, which equates to roughly $31 per share or a 62% premium on current Yahoo share price.
“We have great respect for Yahoo!, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft. “We believe our combination will deliver superior value to our respective shareholders and better choice and innovation to our customers and industry partners.”
The combination will create a more efficient company with synergies in four areas: scale economics driven by audience critical mass and increased value for advertisers; combined engineering talent to accelerate innovation; operational efficiencies through elimination of redundant cost; and the ability to innovate in emerging user experiences such as video and mobile. Microsoft believes these four areas will generate at least $1 billion in annual synergy for the combined entity.
Yahoo’s stock has risen $10.27 to $29.45 in premarket trading still a bit shy of it’s 52-week high of $34.08 and both Google and Microsoft shares are currently down.
We’ll have to wait and see what happens as a result of this acquisition (if it does get approval). I am not a fan of Yahoo offerings other than Flickr but what will this mean for many of the users of Yahoo services. There has always been discontent with Microsoft and its implementations of online services especially when it comes to data mining. Our best hope is that even with the acquisition, Yahoo will still maintain its culture and not subcom completely to the Microsoft machine.
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Tags: microsoft, yahoo
Those of you that know me, know that I am an Apple convert. It’s been nearly 2 years since I purchased my first mac and have been in a’mored ever since. The only caveat is the office suite available for the mac was a bit old and crude in its implementation. Don’t get me wrong, even as old as it was it still seemed far more advanced than at the time office 2000. But wanted something that was fully integrated with my OS and a bit speedier I switched to the “office suite” from Apple. This time around they included a spreadsheet application (not quite as good as excel) but was a welcome addition since there wasn’t a spreadsheet application before. I found that the interfaces were as slick as one would expect from Apple and the software ran great. The bad news is that some of the features that I had become accustomed to in Microsoft’s office suite were not available still. The one big missing feature was the ability to do a mail merge form a list of names. Sure you can do one form your address book but if your pulling names form your website or have a list that you market to, you may not want to have those names in your address book just to do a mail merge.
Needless to say, I still like the offering from Apple as the footprint is small and the software does just about all I want it to. If I could get better exchange server support in mail.app then I would be in heaven. Today Microsoft will launch its new office suite for mac and it looks to be a serious contender. So much so, I may have ot switch. Strageny, just like there vista, the office suite comes in a variety of flavors and looks like it has to do with exchange server support in entourage. I think we’ll have to wait and see from the release what the real differences are. Check out the video below and I think you’ll agree that the updated suite looks good, but lets wait and see how well it is integrated into OS X 
[wp_youtube]G1TniLEO9ew[/wp_youtube]
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Tags: offcie2008, microsoft, mac
