Microsoft Buying Yahoo OR Yahoo Buying MSN?
Charlie Rose is one of the last remaining hard core interviewers left on American Television. His recent interview with Microsoft Corp.’s CEO Steve Ballmer was revealing as much as it was evasive. Rose asked Balmer to disclose whether the company continues to mull an acquisition of Yahoo Inc.
In a joint interview with Cisco Systems’ CEO and Chairman John Chambers, “If we were I wouldn’t tell you, if I weren’t I wouldn’t tell you,” Ballmer said Monday when asked point-blank by Rose if Microsoft was currently in considering Yahoo to merge. The two CEOs appeared together in New York to discuss the collaboration between Microsoft and Cisco.
There has been a lot of speculation that Yahoo and Microsoft were considering a possible deal earlier this year. However as the year progressed and Microsoft’s announced it would buy digital media and marketing services firm aQuantive in May in a $6 billion deal and Jerry Yang rose to CEO of Yahoo speculation died down. The deal, Microsoft’s largest, recently closed and the possibility of acquiring Yahoo seems unlikely.
In following interviews, Ballmer said Microsoft has no plans to do another large merger like aQuantive. Instead, the company will focus on a combination of making smaller acquisitions and new opportunities where it is necessary to help Microsoft compete with Google. “We’re going to buy more stuff and build more stuff … but we don’t have a major conquest,” he said. “Sometimes we’ll have to decide what’s better — to buy or to build.”
Ironically, after the interview various financial blogs suggest the possibility that Yahoo may be considering the option of acquiring MSN as a means of battling it’s own Google challenge. However, speculation of such a deal seems very unlikely and ridiculous in light of the aQuantive acquisition.
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Reader Comments.
Thsi quote from Steve Ballmer is very telling ” Sometimes we’ll have to decide what’s better — to buy or to build.”
Based on the poor response to the new MSN “Live” search engine, it would appear that Microsoft is leaning towards buying vs. building. Are the rumors ture, has Jerry Yang been visiting Redmond?
what was the point of this article?
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