The recent rumors of Microsoft making another bid to acquire Yahoo surfaced again this week. The Wall Street Journal reports via unnamed sources that Microsoft is working with two other investor groups, Silver Lake Partners and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, on an offer to buy Yahoo. The story claims that Microsoft would put in several million dollars for the Yahoo proposal, with the other two investment partners putting in their own amounts. Their part of the bid would be less than Microsoft"s share. The total amount of the proposal to buy Yahoo was not reported.
Whatever the new amount might be, it"s not likely that Microsoft will offer anywhere near what they did in 2008 when it proposed to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion. Yahoo ended up rejecting that bid and this week Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that because of the Great Recession that hit later that year, Microsoft was "lucky" that the deal didn"t go through after all.
In related news, Business Insider reports that Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang deflected questions about the possible sale of Yahoo in an address this week at the AsiaD conference. He did talk about Yahoo"s agreement with Microsoft to have them take over Yahoo"s search business in 2009. Yang said, "It takes trial and error. It takes work. I will probably venture that the Microsoft folks would say the partnership hasn’t gone the way they wanted." So far the revenues from the search business have not been as high as expected.