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Microsoft Bid Yahoo

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Submitted By bester308
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Yahoo! was founded in 1994 by Stanford Ph.d. students Devid Filo and Jerry Yang, and incorporated in 1995. The company’s offerings to users fall into five categories: Search, communications and communities, media, connected life. Microsoft was incorporated in 1981. Its business includes five major segments: Client, Server and Tools, Online Service Business, Microsoft business division, entertainment and devices division.
On February 1st 2008, Microsoft initiated the bid for Yahoo! by bear hug. The offer represents a 62 percent premium above the closing price of Yahoo! common stock on Jan. 31, 2008. It is controversial to define whether the deal is a hostile takeover or not. The fact is Microsoft indeed publicly delivered the bid letter with premium price to Yahoo! boards, which seems genuine and generous. But on Apr 6th, Microsoft also threatened that they would claim to the existing Yahoo! shareholders to elect a new board and replace Jerry Yang, which is a typical hostile takeover approach.
In order to analyze the reasons behind Microsoft’s decision to acquire Yahoo!, let’s look at the market share of search engine first.

As we can see from the graph above, in Feb 2007, Google had moved up to 50% while Microsoft slipped to 11%. Before 2008, the top 3 profitable businesses for Microsoft are Windows Desktop, Windows Server, and Office. But in terms of the search space and online advertising market, which is highly profitable and potential market, Google had continued to dominate the market and picked up the market share. In this case, Microsoft wanted to improve its competitiveness in this market by acquiring Yahoo! through sharing cost and operational efficiency. However, most important reasons are especially in following aspects. First, the most important thing Microsoft wanted to get from Yahoo! is its R&D resource on search index and advertising

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