Filed under: Deals, Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo! (YHOO)

Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) bid $44.6 billion in cash and stock for Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO). This bid is 62% above Yahoo’s closing price on Thursday.

This is great news for Yahoo shareholders since its new CEO is clearly in over his head — flailing around with mediocre performance and an ineffectual combination of headcount reductions and investments in long-term goals that have little chance of actually being achieved. Like Rupert Murdoch’s bid for Dow Jones, Microsoft’s price is so high that it is hard to imagine another bidder topping it.

For Microsoft, the Yahoo bid is clearly focused on counteracting Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG)’s dominance of online advertising. When combined with Microsoft’s online properties — which had about 8% share of total online spending — with Yahoo, which had about 19% share, the two companies will have a combined market share of about 27%. This is much closer to Google’s 32%.

Continue reading Does Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo make sense?

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 1:46 pm and is filed under Stocks Money News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.