The largest offer after the PayPal deal is on paper now. Has 'Bill's Hard Drive' (courtesy NY Post) done the trick here ? Steven Ballmer's letter offers $44.6 billion to Yahoo! for its acquisition. And its widely said that Yahoo! will give in to the deal. Google's Eric Schimdt has openly protested against this deal. He has even called up good friend Jerry Yang to offer help to retaliate the progress from Microsoft. Yahoo! has even said it needed time to think about this deal. The Yahoo! shares have leaped after this announcement.
Now the war between Google and Microsoft is evident. But the point that I look upon is after the merger, if it happens, how will Yahoo! be treated my Microsoft. Will MS actually make the web a better place by encouraging Open Source initiative or will it shadow the web in the same way that it has with the PC ? With the vast array of products that Yahoo! has, it may be well possible that MS will dominate these areas with a dominating notion. Instant messaging, Mail and want not (For all I know Hotmail and Yahoo Mail may become Hot Yahoo! Mail ).
I sent a mail regarding this to a community of mine and the reactions were quite astounding. Some of them reacted to the offer as a good thing. That MS would try to make Yahoo! a better firm and promote Open Source Software and try not to ruin the Internet. They will take the 'consumers' as entities and not dumb terminals. I was skeptical about that comment anyway. One of my friends in Yahoo! said that he was praying for the merger to dissolve.
Here are some related material :-
Yahoo, Google, Microsft Acquisitions Timeline
Yahoo Acquisitions
Microsoft Acquisitions
Yahoo Finance
BBC News on the subject
BBC News ShotGun Marriage
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