Yahoo ! hit after deal with Mircosoft

Posted on Friday, August 28, 2009

Carol Bartz, who was brought in as Yahoo's CEO after Jerry Yang failed to accept Microsoft's acquisition offers, seemed determined to get Yahoo back on its feet independent of all other companies. Or failing that, she was at least supposed to hold out for "boatloads of money."

But she didn't. The new Microsoft-Yahoo deal doesn't involve any sort of upfront payment; a bit of revenue-sharing is all that's supposed to take place.

So Yahoo's stock has taken quite a hit since the deal went through. On July 28th - just before the official announcement was made - it closed $17.22. This morning, it's trading at $14.63 - a full 15.0 percent lower.

Meanwhile, investors are behind Microsoft, but not in a particularly big way - it's just moved from $23.47 to $23.88 (an increase of 1.7 percent) during the same time period.

We might be witnessing a deal that'll go down as one of the online sector's biggest ever goofs, then. (Assuming it goes through at all. Microsoft and Yahoo have set their sights on early 2010, with all sorts of integration issues and antitrust investigations possibly standing before them.) Yahoo's shareholders might try to take a bit of comfort in that fact, at least.