Microsoft offers 44 billion to buy Yahoo!

Yesterday Microsoft announced that it wants to buy Yahoo for $31 a share in an unsolicited offer. The bid represents a 62 percent premium on Yahoo shares. The two companies tried to make a go of it a year ago, but negotiations broke down. Whereas before they were considering a partnership, this time around Microsoft is offering to buy Yahoo.

It would be one of the largest technology acquisitions ever, and certainly the largest for Microsoft, dwarfing the company's $6 billion deal for aQuantive last year. The offer comes as older, more established tech giants like Microsoft and Yahoo struggle to meet the newer threats posed by Google (GOOG: 524.24, -40.06, -7.09%), which dominates the online-search landscape.

"Our lives, our businesses, and even our society have been progressively transformed by the Web, and Yahoo! has played a pioneering role by building compelling, high-scale services and infrastructure," said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft in a press release announcing the offer. "The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our own."

[From Fox News]

Google claims not to be concerned about the potential acquisition, but we know they’re just playing it cool. It’s like that time in high school when that boy you liked asked out that other girl who was younger than you and you acted like you didn’t give a shit, but were actually throwing up in the bathroom for hours afterwards. Except that in this version, Steve Ballmer is not quite as cute as the guy you liked. Close though. Yahoo said it was giving “careful and prompt” consideration to Microsoft’s offer. Which means they’re not playing hard to get like you’re supposed to… yet. We’ll see if Yahoo and Microsoft end up being voted Prom King and Queen, or if Microsoft ends up sulking in the corner, picking at its face. At which point Google might decide to go to the dance after all, grab its tux from the closet, and sweep Yahoo right off her feet. Which would be a really sweet deal, because Google is close to having a near-monopoly over advertising revenue. Wait, I lost the analogy.

Picture Note by JayBird: Microsoft hotties Bill Gates (above) and C.E.O. Steve Ballmer (below).