BBC reports:

Microsoft has offered to buy the search engine company Yahoo for $44.6bn in cash and shares.

The offer, contained in a letter to Yahoo’s board, is 62% above Yahoo’s closing share price on Thursday.

Yahoo cut its revenue forecasts earlier this week and said it would have to spend an additional $300m this year trying to revive the company.

It has been struggling in recent years to compete with Google, which has also been a competitor to Microsoft.

So it has come down to this – G vs. M – sort of a final frontier for the web/search space, before our civilization move on to the next greatest platform. However, stock market confidence suggests differently:

MS vs. Yahoo

While both these 2 stocks are less than $50 a piece, Google’s stock is still above $500 amidst the general downturn of the US economy. Even as you take Google’s PE ratio (40.36 last I check), Microsoft’s (17.32), and Yahoo’s (60.38) into account, we’re still talking about a 2 to 3 times difference in expectations, with wall street rallying behind Google.

Alas, not that I care that much these days, but surely we’ve seen the massive downsizing of Yahoo! recently amidst its legacy of acquiring and building one of the most enduring portal. In fact locally in SG and MY, Yahoo still commands a bigger mind share than Google, with many older generation users still having Yahoo as their homepage. Alexa is one way to see this.

I hope that with all these consolidation, the IT industry won’t become a industry of the yester-year. It wasn’t that long ago when small agile companies were changing the way we live, work and play. Now, big elephants want that share and they are sucking up the mice.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Share

You Should Also Check Out This Post:

More Active Posts: