Remember When Microsoft Almost Bought Yahoo For $50 Billion?

Perhaps once bought by Microsoft it wouldn't have gone so bad.

I bet MS is regretting not pushing it right now. That meant they could have possibly ended up with Mayer instead of Balmer as the CEO.

That deal included some of the most foolish business decisions made in a long time and interestingly enough both sides made the entirely wrong decision. Microsoft was stupid for bidding, Yahoo was stupid for rejecting.

Remember that msft sold Avenue A/Razorfish [1] to Publicis for $530mm, plus IIRC something on the order of a billion dollars of guaranteed purchases of msft display inventory ([2] mentions but doesn't know the amount), though I could be way off on that. So msft probably got $1B back from the $6B purchase, so I don't understand how they can write down more than $5B. Anyway, it means the aQuantive purchase was 16% less shitty than everyone reports =P

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avenue_A/Razorfish

[2] http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/microsoft-s...