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Industry Trends

Microsoft Stops Shopping For Acquisitions. Or Have They?

By June 26, 2008July 30th, 2023No Comments

The Seattle Post Intelligencer reported earlier this week that over the last one year, Microsoft has added about 11,200 employees to its payroll. Most of these have been the result of the several takeovers they have conducted in the past year or so, in their effort to improve their position in the search market.

aQuantive, Fast Search and Transfer and Farecast each brought in a few hundred employees when they got acquired by Microsoft.

The AOL branch of Time Warner and Facebook were among several others believed to have been on Microsoft’s shopping list. However they have decided to put a stop to any further acquisitions for now.

After the failure of talks with Yahoo!, Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer and Kevin Johnson, Head of Microsoft’s Windows and Internet Businesses, explained to the Financial Times that the attempt to buy Yahoo! was with the sole intention of strengthening Microsoft’s advertising business, of which search advertising is the most important part for revenue generation.

Steve Ballmer said, “at the end of the day, this is about the ad platform. This is not about just one of the applications.” Microsoft supposedly would work towards these goals from within and said they had made plans to build a center for search technology in Europe.

Today however, fresh rumours surfaced about renwed talks of a full acquisition of Yahoo! at a price lower than the $33 they had previously offered.