Microsoft bids $44 billion for Yahoo

Microsoft announced a $44.6 billion cash and stock offer to buy Yahoo.
This is around $31 per-share. A whopping 62 percent premium over Yahoo's closing stock price this past Thursday. If it closes this will be the largest Internet deal since Time Warner and AOL merged.

Combining Yahoo with MSN constitutes the webs largest merger of portals. Right now standing alone MSN is the 5th largest. This should make Google take a second look at their long term strategy. But don't kid yourself-they have most likely been expecting a move like this from Microsoft.

It is reported Steve Ballmer's driving factor for the merger are scale of
economics, expanded R&D capacity, operational efficiencies & emerging user experiences.

So if it goes down you can expect Microsoft and Yahoo to focus engineering resources developing emerging services associated with mobile content, video, online commerce, social media & social platforms.

Microsoft reported that they expect that the deal to be completed in late 2008.