Awesome move! Good work! Now the question is....will they buy ********?

I guess Ballmer isnt a *complete* idiot. He's a notoriously cheap man, so it's not a total surprise.

Ding dong the witch is dead! It feels like someone finally poured that bucket of water on Steve.

Actually, he is not an idiot in fact, he sees something others don't see right now. That's why he walked out. When you look at Yahoo it's... meh... it's old.

Yang's happy. Yahoo employees are happy. Heck, Microsoft employees are happy. Yahoo shareholders are going to be quite unhappy... on Monday when the market opens, and later after Yahoo's share price drops far below where it is today.

Will Balmer still go for the proxy fight, or has he finally seen the light?

Microsoft shareholders (including me -- surprised, Macbeach?) are happy too. Shares should go back up a few bucks.

@deathbychichi: Yahoo employees happy? not unless they've already sold all their stock. i gotta think a bunch of folks are pissed at Jerry for tanking their options come monday morning.

[500hats.typepad.com]

He'll be back later to buy this thing for $20

Maybe if Yahoo! employee's are lucky Microsoft will set aside part of that $1.5B they were going to use to retain Yahoo! employees and offer the cream of the crop some nice incentive to hop off of the sinking ship sailing into the headwinds

@deathbychichi: Yahoo might be old, but Microsoft’s older. That’s the problem in a nutshell: both companies have so much legacy that they cannot attract the best and brightest, and their executives are scared of any radical change. Not to mention the integration nightmares from trying to merge two undocumented and overpatched systems. Talk about dinosaurs mating.

Microsoft buying Yahoo for its technology is like stripping an Edsel for parts for your Oldsmobile: in theory you can, but why bother?

No, the goal was the entrenched customer list. Ballmer finally realized that there would be massive customer defections as Yahoo’s various properties disintegrated because the “people in the know” fled from the Moloch from Seattle. The techies may be annoyed at Yahoo, but they loathe Microsoft.

It took thirty years, but the Valley finally learned that you just don’t deal with Microsoft if you want to survive.

Yeah, we'll be seeing yahoo at 5 before it's all over with. Saved from a moronic decision by hubris: only in the valley