The web is afire with the news that after its latest bid attempt to takeover Yahoo failed, Microsoft decided to back down. My desktop news widget is going wild with this news… updating every 30s or so with more updates from Wall Street Journal, CNN Money, Forbes, Information Week, CNet News, etc; hot news indeed. All those big time journals aside it appears that BoomTown’s Kara Swisher was the first to break the news.
So what happened? Why not read it directly from Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer:
May 3, 2008
Mr. Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo
Yahoo Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089Dear Jerry:
After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo.
I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo’s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal. I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter, and I especially appreciate the time that you have invested personally. I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible.
I am disappointed that Yahoo has not moved towards accepting our offer. I first called you with our offer on January 31 because I believed that a combination of our two companies would have created real value for our respective shareholders and would have provided consumers, publishers, and advertisers with greater innovation and choice in the marketplace. Our decision to offer a 62 percent premium at that time reflected the strength of these convictions.
In our conversations this week, we conveyed our willingness to raise our offer to $33.00 per share, reflecting again our belief in this collective opportunity. This increase would have added approximately another $5 billion of value to your shareholders, compared to the current value of our initial offer. It also would have reflected a premium of over 70 percent compared to the price at which your stock closed on January 31. Yet it has proven insufficient, as your final position insisted on Microsoft paying yet another $5 billion or more, or at least another $4 per share above our $33.00 offer.
Also, after giving this week’s conversations further thought, it is clear to me that it is not sensible for Microsoft to take our offer directly to your shareholders. This approach would necessarily involve a protracted proxy contest and eventually an exchange offer. Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft.
We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo undesirable to us for a number of reasons:
— First, it would fundamentally undermine Yahoo’s own strategy and long-term viability by encouraging advertisers to use Google as opposed to your Panama paid search system. This would also fragment your search advertising and display advertising strategies and the ecosystem surrounding them. This would undermine the reliance on your display advertising business to fuel future growth.
— Given this, it would impair Yahoo’s ability to retain the talented engineers working on advertising systems that are important to our interest in a combination of our companies.
— In addition, it would raise a host of regulatory and legal problems that no acquirer, including Microsoft, would want to inherit. Among other things, this would consolidate market share with the already-dominant paid search provider in a manner that would reduce competition and choice in the marketplace.
— This would also effectively enable Google to set the prices for key search terms on both their and your search platforms and, in the process, raise prices charged to advertisers on Yahoo. In addition to whatever resulting legal problems, this seems unwise from a business perspective unless in fact one simply wishes to use this as a vehicle to exit the paid search business in favor of Google.
— It could foreclose any chance of a combination with any other search provider that is not already relying on Google’s search services.
Accordingly, your apparent plan to pursue such an arrangement in the event of a proxy contest or exchange offer leads me to the firm decision not to pursue such a path. Instead, I hereby formally withdraw Microsoft’s proposal to acquire Yahoo.
We will move forward and will continue to innovate and grow our business at Microsoft with the talented team we have in place and potentially through strategic transactions with other business partners.
I still believe even today that our offer remains the only alternative put forward that provides your stockholders full and fair value for their shares. By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table.
But clearly a deal is not to be.
Thank you again for the time we have spent together discussing this.
Sincerely yours,
Steven A. Ballmer
Chief Executive Officer
Microsoft Corporation
May 3, 2008
Yahoo’s Reply
Yahoo’s Chairman Roy Bostock issued a public statement that included some jubilant words from Jerry Yang about the “distraction of Microsoft’s unsolicited bid”:
“We remain focused on maximizing shareholder value and pursuing strategic opportunities that position Yahoo! for success and leadership in its markets. From the beginning of this process, our independent board and our management have been steadfast in our belief that Microsoft’s offer undervalued the company and we are pleased that so many of our shareholders joined us in expressing that view. Yahoo! is profitable, growing, and executing well on its strategic plan to capture the large opportunities in the relatively young online advertising market. Our solid results for the first quarter of 2008 and increased full year 2008 operating cash flow outlook reflect the progress the company is making. Today, Yahoo! has:
— a refined strategic focus to drive enhanced volume and yield;
— reorganized to focus its efforts on its most promising products and services;
— invested in innovations designed to revolutionize display advertising and facilitate closing the competitive gap in search; and
— enhanced expense and resource management to support improved profitability.”
Jerry Yang, co-founder and chief executive officer, Yahoo! Inc. added, “I am incredibly proud of the way our team has come together over the last three months. This process has underscored our unique and valuable strategic position. With the distraction of Microsoft’s unsolicited proposal now behind us, we will be able to focus all of our energies on executing the most important transition in our history so that we can maximize our potential to the benefit of our shareholders, employees, partners and users.”
BONUS – Ballmer’s Internal Memo to Microsoft
I came across this article at CNet a few minutes ago showing a copy of Steve Ballmer’s internatl memo to Microsoft staff and felt it was worth including:
From: Steve Ballmer
Sent: Saturday, May 03, 2008 5:18 PM
To: Microsoft – All Employees (QBDG)
Subject: Withdrawal of Offer to Acquire Yahoo!This afternoon I sent the attached letter to Jerry Yang announcing that Microsoft has withdrawn its proposal to acquire Yahoo. We proposed the deal in the belief that a Microsoft-Yahoo merger would create a combined company with the resources and assets to win in the fast-growing market for advertising and online services.
Although the acquisition of Yahoo would have accelerated our ability to deliver on our strategy in advertising and online services, I remain confident that we can achieve our goals without Yahoo. We have a strategy in place to do so and we will continue to expand on this strategy and accelerate our progress.
Our strategy has three components:
- Deliver on the basics. We will continue to improve search relevance and build out our ad platform.
- Change the game through innovation. We will expand investments in engineering and deliver transformative tools and Web experiences.
- Expand our global scale and focus. We will pursue partnerships and investments to realize the competitive advantages that come with scale.
At the heart of our strategy is a commitment to bring the benefits of competition, choice, and innovation to everyone who uses the Internet–from consumers to content creators to advertisers.
We are 100 percent focused on executing on this strategy and we have made good progress in a very short time. We’ve improved search relevance dramatically, introduced compelling new search verticals, successfully integrated Aquantive, and added nearly 100 new publishers to our ad platform. In the last couple of months we’ve rolled out new versions of key products including Internet Explorer and Silverlight, and introduced new technologies like Live Mesh. We now have over 430 million active users of our Windows Live services worldwide. And we continue to add new technologies with acquisitions such as YaData, which brings leading-edge behavioral targeting technology, and Caligari, which gives us advanced 3D modeling capabilities that will help us continue to improve Virtual Earth.
Ultimately, our goal is to build the industry-leading business in search, online advertising, media, and social networking.
We are absolutely committed to being the leader in each of these areas. Now is the time to do what we have always done best–be tenacious, focus on the long term, innovate, and keep working hard.
I want to thank all of you for your patience during this process and for your dedication and hard work across all of our businesses. We asked that you remain focused on our goals through these cycles, and you have done this extremely well. We are committed to making the investments that will enable us to compete and, ultimately, lead in the online services and advertising businesses. Together, I know we will succeed.
Steve
Oh Well
Too bad, I had really hoped this merger would go through for entirely self serving reasons noted previously. That said, huge huge kudos are due to Jerry Yang and his impressive team. I have to wonder just how much sleep they managed to get over the past 3 months since Ballmer’s ‘unsolicited’ kick in the teeth; they have been busier than a one-legged man in an arse kicking contest. Here is a rundown (I plan on updating it soon to bring it up to date) on what Yahoo was up to for only part of that 3 month process… it is a long list.
By the way, I think someone at Wikipedia needs to update their Yahoo Timeline.