Microhoo! Telenovela Ends? - Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo! Bid

Do you feel that? It's a disturbance in the force... like a million voices cried out and then were silenced...

... Or at least that's what I think it sounded like in Steve Ballmer's office as Microsoft reached the decision to withdraw its bid for Yahoo! and end our favourite tech telenovela of the year.

Ballmer said this in a letter to Jerry Yang (the CEO of Yahoo!) announcing the cessation of assimilation procedures:

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

You mean like doubling employee's severance packages in the event of a company take-over to encourage a mass exodus of talent, making the company worthless? You didn't think Yahoo! was going to play nice, did you Ballmer?

Somehow, the news seems disappointing to me. Almost anticlimactic. I expected more fireworks to accompany someone as outspoken as Ballmer backing down from hostile threats. His new nickname should be "all bark and no bite," in my opinion.

As for Yahoo!, the jury is still out on whether this is good news or not, but I can tell you this: Wall Street doesn't like it. As of this writing, Yahoo! stock had tumbled down 15%
to 24.41 on the news.

However, we all know how twitchy stock brokers can be, and I think in the end Yahoo! will come out the better for it. Their new partnership with Google for search ads as well as a rumoured merger with AOL to expand its content holdings, one of its core competencies, will most likely be much more beneficial to Yahoo! as a company than being assimilated into the Microsoft collective.

No matter what, Jerry Yang has his work cut out for him to prove to investors that fighting off Microsoft was the right thing to do.

Microsoft Withdraws Its Bid for Yahoo [NYT]