An E-Mail From Steve Ballmer To Microsoft Employees!
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The Micro-Hoo deal which was getting hotter by the day has finally come to an end. In a chronological order here are the things that took place in between.
- Microsoft rumored to buy out Yahoo!
- Microsoft reveals its plan to but Yahoo!
- Google raises questions about Microsoft-Yahoo merger.
- Yahoo rejects Microsoft’s offer.
- Yahoo’s letter to Steve Ballmer.
- Microsoft’s Deadline to Yahoo passes.
- Microsoft raises its bid.
Microsoft had raised its bid to $33 per share but Yahoo wanted anything between $35-$37 per share. And Microsoft was not willing to pay more than $33 per share. Besides that they did not find it sensible enough to take the deal directly to the share holders. Therefore, finally Microsoft walked away. After the deal was closed Steve Ballmer sent an e-mail to all his employees which is as follows:
From: Steve Ballmer
Date: May 3, 2008 5:17:30 PM PDT
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This afternoon I sent the attached letter to Jerry Yang announcing that Microsoft has withdrawn its proposal to acquire Yahoo.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
Knowing Microsoft it is hard to believe that this is the end of the deal. Or may be it is a new beginning. I guess we have to wait and watch.
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Although they have said clearly that they wont go hostile on yahoo .. ‘Microsoft also won’t be looking at its option for a hostile takeover, stating that Yahoo! likely would take steps that would make [it] undesirable as an acquisition’
But even if MS decides to go hostile, they will say its all over for the moment. Let the stock prices drop and then…
@ Ankur: For the time Yahoo is safe. But very soon it needs to have some drastic change or it will have to face the wrath of its shareholders. Since Microsoft withdrew the deal its offer the Yahoo share price has fallen by 20%
For more detail analysis check out this post