Posted on Thursday, July 24 2008 @ 23:47 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer
said today that any current merger plans with Yahoo are dead.
"Yahoo for us was always a tactic, not a strategy," Ballmer said during the company's annual financial analyst meeting.
When Microsoft talks about "the need to change our position revenue per search curve, Yahoo is a tactic to accelerate that," he said. Yahoo and Microsoft also would have "had R&D and capital expense synergies by coming together."
At this point, however, "there's nothing under discussion between the two of us," Ballmer said. "It didn't work out; we're done."
Microsoft made an unsolicited bid for Yahoo in February, but after much back and forth, a bid for Yahoo's search business, and a proxy bid for Yahoo by billionaire investor Carl Icahn, a combined Microsoft-Yahoo never came to fruition.
Microsoft imposed tight deadlines on Yahoo in order to get everything in order before Election Day so there would not be "administration shifts" during final negotiations, Ballmer said.
"We offered, they didn't like it, we left," he said.
