Microsoft's $45 billion bid for Yahoo

Microsoft has announced just now that they are making a $45 billion bid to acquire Yahoo.

This is directly from the Microsoft press release:

Microsoft Proposes Acquisition of Yahoo! for $31 per Share
Transaction

valued at approximately $44.6 billion in cash and stock; provides 62 percent
premium to current trading price for Yahoo! shareholders; combined entity to
create a more competitive company, providing superior value to shareholders,
better choice and innovation for customers and partners

“We have great respect for Yahoo!, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft. “We believe our combination will deliver superior value to our respective shareholders and better choice and innovation to our customers and industry partners.”

“Our lives, our businesses, and even our society have been progressively transformed by the Web, and Yahoo! has played a pioneering role by building compelling, high-scale services and infrastructure,” said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft. “The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our own.”

The Microsoft board of directors sent this offer to the Yahoo board of directors and the letter accompanying the offer is part of the Microsoft press release, too.

If this goes through, it would indeed be a curious transformation of the web. There are two "major" web sites that I rarely ever visit: www.yahoo.com and www.msn.com - imagine how appealing a combination of them would be...

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