At the time, Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer described the move this way, "“We have great respect for Yahoo!, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market.” “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. “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.” “The combined assets and strong services focus of these two companies will enable us to achieve scale economics while reaching R&D critical mass to deliver innovation breakthroughs,” said Kevin Johnson, president of the Platforms & Services Division of Microsoft. “The industry will be well served by having more than one strong player, offering more value and real choice to advertisers, publishers and consumers.”

Indeed, the letter that was sent from the Microsoft Board of Directors to the Yahoo! Board of Directors includes, "In late 2006 and early 2007, we jointly explored a broad range of ways in which our two companies might work together. These discussions were based on a vision that the online businesses of Microsoft and Yahoo! should be aligned in some way to create a more effective competitor in the online marketplace. We discussed a number of alternatives ranging from commercial partnerships to a merger proposal, which you rejected. While a commercial partnership may have made sense at one time, Microsoft believes that the only alternative now is the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! that we are proposing."

After much to'ing-and-fro'ing by the two companies, Yahoo!'s April 7th response, however, was an unencouraging, "We consider your threat to commence an unsolicited offer and proxy contest to displace our independent board members to be counterproductive and inconsistent with your stated objective of a friendly transaction", in a reply to the Microsoft Board, while also saying Yahoo! is open to a deal but only at a higher price. Yahoo's letter also said Microsoft had not responded to requests for more information on antitrust issues since a deal would be subject to regulators: "To date, you have still not provided any of the requested information."

Well, that's that! Microsoft has officially pulled its bid for Yahoo! -- inflated for good measure this weekend by another $5 billion -- after the company did "not move toward accepting [the] offer", asking again for even more, another $4 bil (totaling $9b more than the original offer). In a letter from [Microsoft CEO Steve] Ballmer to [Yahoo! CEO Jerry] Yang, he states that Microsoft also won't be looking at its option for a hostile takeover, stating that Yahoo! likely "would take steps that would make [it] undesirable as an acquisition"; Ballmer then goes on to make a few backhanded criticisms of Yahoo's possible new partnerships with Google (which is no surprise). Good night, Microhoo, the monstrous, hamstrung, lumbering mega-merger that might have been.

Update: Yahoo! makes its public response here. Yang sums it up: "With the distraction of Microsoft's unsolicited proposal now behind us, we will be able to focus all of our energies..." etc. Alright then.