Yahoo has rejected a takeover offer of $41bn (nearly £21bn) from Micro$oft saying that it undervalued the company!

Shares in Yahoo closed at $19.18 (about £10) on the 1st February when Micro$oft made their offer and the $41bn offer would have been worth $31 (about £15) per share.  Amazingly, the Wall Street Journal reckons that Yahoo won’t accept less than $40 per share and that Micro$oft will probably pay it.

A combined MSN/Yahoo will put Google back in the position of plucky underdog which can only be a good thing because they’ve been turning corporate lately.  But increasing the dominance of Micro$oft is generally a bad thing for the consumer and, of course, merging MSN and Yahoo reduces consumer choice.

Micro$oft reckons that by merging with Yahoo it can offer a better and cheaper service but Google already offers a better search engine and better free web applications than Yahoo and Micro$oft for nothing.  As painful as it is to admit it, Micro$oft is good at writing software.  Ok, it tends to be bloated and full of features that are useless to most people, not to mention incredibly expensive, but technology would be nowhere near where it is today if it wasn’t for Micro$oft.  They now need to move away from the desktop and look at ways of better supporting remote working but for that they need the communications industry to “grow up”.  Micro$oft are approaching the challenge the wrong way – at this stage they would be better off investing their $40bn in the communications industry to develop the technology that will allow them to deliver their bloated applications into the home over residential internet connections than investing in a company attempting (and failing) to create a market for online content that only a relatively small percentage of the population can fully benefit from.

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