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Yahoo! shares! hit! five! year! low!

Microhoo! chances 'negligible'

Yahoo!'s share price dipped to $17.75 on Thursday, hitting its lowest point since October 2003.

As the Associated Press points out, the company's market value now sits at about $13bn below what Microsoft would have lavished on investors had Jerry Yang and crew accepted Redmond's May takeover bid. Steve Ballmer's final Microhoo! offer was $33 a share.

Yang has said - over and over again - that his primary goal is "maximizing value for our shareholders." But he may have missed his chance. Yesterday, Bloomberg reports, Redmond CTO Chris Liddell played down the chances of a Microhoo! revival.

"You never say never, I can never say that, but it's so close to negligible," Liddell said during a conference in New York.

In July, Liddell called Yahoo! a "declining asset." And yesterday, he said it again: "We continue to value Yahoo as a declining asset...At some stage it just makes no sense anymore. So you never say never about these acquisitions, but the time came and went."

Yahoo! is hoping to boost its revenues by enlarging Google's already ginormous search advertising monopoly. But as you might expect, this move is facing heavy scrutiny from US regulators.

Yang says he will somehow increase Yahoo!'s revenues 25 per cent in each of the next two years. But not everyone believes him. After its annual shareholder meeting last month, Yahoo! originally said that only 14.6 per cent of shareholders disapproved of Yang, but after catching an egregious vote tabulation error, the company acknowledged that the true was closer to 34 per cent. Meanwhile, almost 40 per cent called for the ouster of Chairman Roy Bostock, Yang's number one ally in the rejection of Ballmer and Microsoft.

The only good news for Yang and Bostock? Today, Yahoo! share price is up. After 1.86 per cent climb, it now sits at $18.08. ®

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