Yahoo has been struggling to compete in the search engine space for a while now. Seeing an opportunity to radically expand its online presence, Microsoft wants to acquire Yahoo and apply its single-minded thirst for profit. But, Yahoo has managed to stall the process for a few weeks.

Microsoft doesn’t like rejection and Yahoo has been dishing it out for a while. That in mind, Microsoft made a public offer about a month ago: $44.6 billion for the reigns to Yahoo’s empire. Still, Yahoo has held out and is protecting its independence for now by delaying director nominations.

Prior to the delay, “hovering over [the] talks has been the possibility that Microsoft could swiftly scuttle [the takeover] by forcing Yahoo to impanel new directors who would accept the Microsoft offer,” according to the Washington Post.

That would impair Yahoo’s ability to independently evaluate the offer, and its Chief Executive Jerry Yang wrote to employees that “our objective here is to enable our board to continue to explore all of its strategic alternatives for maximizing value for stockholders without the distraction of a proxy contest.”

This deal was spurred by heated competition between Google and Microsoft, who both accuse the other of being too powerful in the online commerce industry.

Google isn’t happy at the prospect, writing “could the acquisition of Yahoo allow Microsoft — despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses — to extend unfair practices from browsers and operation systems to the Internet?”

Yahoo was a pioneer on the Internet and its service offering now includes:

- Search

- Instant messaging

- E-mail

- Personals

- Photo sharing community (Flickr)

- News

- Music

- Games

- Mobile services

- Online advertising

Related:

Entry was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 8:46 pm under Internet, Microsoft, Yahoo!.

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