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The world has changed a lot since January 31, 2008. In case you’ve just tuned in, here’s a quick recap of the last nine and a half months:
- Microsoft makes an unsolicited bid for Yahoo.
- Yahoo stocks make a serious jump.
- Yahoo really thought it over, but decided to go with a search ad deal with Google instead.
- Google dropped Yahoo.
- Yahoo stocks take a serious dive.
- Yahoo dropped CEO Jerry Yang.
Yep, that’s it in a nutshell. Despite Yahoo’s initial rejection and later renewed-then-foundered courtship with Microsoft, rumors have persisted that Microsoft is still interested in purchasing all or part of Yahoo.
Microsoft disagrees. According to MarketWatch (via), at the annual shareholders’ meeting, CEO Steve Ballmer said:
Let me be as clear as I think I’ve tried to be publicly. . . .
We are done with all acquisition discussions with Yahoo. I’ve said that a bunch of times. Somehow some people have gotten confused nonetheless.
We did our best. We thought we had something that made sense. It didn’t make sense to them. We’ve moved on.
But perhaps he doth protest too much—especially when he follows that up with saying that purchasing the search portion of Yahoo is “interesting.”
The WSJ and Seattle PI (via) also report that Ballmer says he’s open to a “search collaboration” with Yahoo.
What do you think—is a Microsoft-Yahoo “search collaboration” a good idea? And what would it look like?
