Not that I think it matters to Google much but still it will be very pleased to hear that Microsoft Corp. yesterday announced that it has withdrawn its proposal to acquire Yahoo! Inc. Microsoft has been trying hard very long to acquire Yahoo and in the process it had raised its original offer from $44.6bn to $47.5bn (£24.1bn) - $33 per share. This has all been going on to compete with Google which has been dominating internet marketing for a long time. But yahoo showed no interest whatsoever to any bid less than $53bn, or $37 a share, which was more than Microsoft was willing to pay. It seems like Google will continue to regime the internet advertising for few more decades.
“Despite our best efforts, including raising our bid by roughly $5 billion, Yahoo! has not moved toward accepting our offer. After careful consideration, we believe the economics demanded by Yahoo! do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Microsoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal,” said Ballmer in Microsoft’s press release.
The text of the letter from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang.
May 3, 2008
Mr. Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
Dear 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
I also heard that Google threw a big party the other night. 
Must be very happy. HEHE
Small but powerful, Neon 7 Mini Touchscreen cell phone is sure to strike your eyes once you see it. Though it is small (only 11mm thick) in compare to the cell phones that we are used to but once you know what this small gadget has installed, you’ll be amazed. Usually, what happened with smaller phones is that the features are decreased along with their size but this is not the case with Neon. The Neon 7 features a 1.3MP Camera/Camcorder, TFT LCD Touchscreen, Heat sensitive buttons that glow, Handwriting recognition, Speech synthesis, Simple POP/IMAP e-mail support, MP3/MP4 Player, Stereo Bluetooth Support, 1GB Storage, and last but not the least a tri-band GSM cell phone. Small, stylish along with all the features you’ll ever need - this is Neon 7 Mini and it is available at ThinkGeek.com for just $199.99. 
Now, I’ve used many different of USB devices from USB flash drives, to hard-drive to mouse, keyboard but this one was just too surprising and funny for me. I mean how people could think of such things. 
It’s no surprise that the price of mobile phones is decreasing day by day. Due to advancement in mobile technologies, the old cell phones have become aged and the result is they are of less value. May be that is the reason why old fashioned mobile phones that are in stock are being sold in such amazing prices.
Here’s again a great deal that I found out today on Norton Products. I have subscribed to Norton’s newsletters and today I got this e-mail from 
I am no much a game geek now but once I was. In the past I used to play computer games 24-7 till I complete all the levels. Grand Theft Auto (GTA) was one of my favorite games along with Need for Speed (NFS) and NBA Live. Still I do have this game (old 
format on your mobile device and other is its supplementary player which obviously allows to playback the converted video onto your mobile device.
