

Remember When Microsoft Almost Bought Yahoo For $50 Billion? - sachitgupta
http://massivegreatness.com/turning-purple-into-red

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mariuolo
Perhaps once bought by Microsoft it wouldn't have gone so bad.

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sixcorners
> Now, it’s of course possible that Yahoo would have done well under
> Microsoft. It’s also possible that unicorns are real. There’s essentially
> nothing to suggest that Microsoft/Yahoo would have worked. Meanwhile,
> there’s plenty to suggest that the opposite would have happened — namely,
> what happened with aQuantive post-acquistion. And the fortunes of Yahoo
> since the rejection.

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Kevin_M_Miller
I bet MS is regretting not pushing it right now. That meant they could have
possibly ended up with Mayer instead of Balmer as the CEO.

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thematt
That deal included some of the most foolish business decisions made in a long
time and interestingly enough both sides made the entirely wrong decision.
Microsoft was stupid for bidding, Yahoo was stupid for rejecting.

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earl
Remember that msft sold Avenue A/Razorfish [1] to Publicis for $530mm, plus
IIRC something on the order of a billion dollars of guaranteed purchases of
msft display inventory ([2] mentions but doesn't know the amount), though I
could be way off on that. So msft probably got $1B back from the $6B purchase,
so I don't understand how they can write down more than $5B. Anyway, it means
the aQuantive purchase was 16% less shitty than everyone reports =P

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avenue_A/Razorfish>

[2]
[http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/microsoft-s...](http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/microsoft-
sells-razorfish-digital-agency-to-the-publicis-groupe/)

