Shareholders are much more important in today's economy than trying to keep a business afloat -and keeping the employees, well, employed. Yahoo! saved its ass, and their employees asses, while probably preventing the shareholders to make a few extra bucks by desertion. If it's considered wrong, maybe there's something rotten in the system.

It's sad that companies are at the beck and call of shareholders. Of course, they did ask for that, but you get the current situation where Yahoo! are too 'proud' to get taken over by Microsoft. I can't see how Yahoo! can justify not selling - I'd really hate them to do so though... If I were in their position I'd do exactly the same.

Yahoo! are going to have to do a massive rethink of their buisness and work out where to go from here. Some of their sites (namely Flickr) have value, but I've no idea what other stuff they're doing.

The info about their European market share is interesting - I can't say I know anyone who uses Yahoo! over Google here (in the UK)... I guess that does mean that their US market share is somewhat better than their global market share though...

Search engine market shares... yeah. Yahoo is much more than a search engine actually (Flickr is only an example, they also own a very interesting "collaborative work" solution, and a few shiny things). I don't really love them (and when I need shiny thing, I bend open source solutions to my needs anyway), but "search engine market shares" barely apply. Especially in this context. MS search engine is the default in IE, which is the default in Windows, which is force-fed to the unwashed mass when they buy a computer. And in spite of that, its market share are risible. So from the "search engine market share" point of view, the second search engine in the world refused to be bought by a company that does very poorly in the same classment, in spite of their genuinely unlawfull bundling policy? As far as I know, MS market share in the "search engine" business would be exactly zero if not for the unlawfull bundling of IE with Windows (not to mention the somewhat questionable bundling of Win with quite every PC. Licence refund anyone?). So how exactly is this "search engine market share" thing relevant in this context?

... the only one thats happy this has fallen through?

I am not a fan of Microsoft by any means (don't hate 'em either though), but absolutely detest Yahoo (sorry guys, you don't deserve the exclamation) and by this having fallen through, we can now guarantee getting a laugh at their expense for even longer!

Hopefully in the meantime, Microsoft can improve Live search (it's been better than Yahoo in terms of quality for years).

er... not quite. Other search engines are now set as default by many OEM PC providers - Google in particular has been very aggressive at cornering its fair share of the market in this regard.

And there are people who choose to use Live search - not sure why, but they're there.

...my teacher used to call ! a "screamer".

So, is Yahoo! banking on a barrage of PR spruking as a future business model? Seems somehow appropriate.

Click on the ! in the logo on the .com homepage to hear the Yahoo yodel.