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Any Yahoo acquisition plans Microsoft might have entertained are now dead, said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO.
A Yahoo merger would have helped Microsoft’s bid to overtake Google in search, Ballmer said, but with the $40 billion bill for Yahoo now off the books, Microsoft is moving on and looking to invest more in search, a business he categorized as a “two-horse race” between Microsoft and Google.
“Yahoo for us was always a tactic, not a strategy,” Ballmer said during the company’s annual financial analyst meeting July 17.
When Microsoft talks about “the need to change our position revenue per search curve, Yahoo is a tactic to accelerate that,” he said. Yahoo and Microsoft also would have “had R&D and capital expense synergies by coming together.”
At this point, however, “there’s nothing under discussion between the two of us,” Ballmer said. “It didn’t work out; we’re done.”
In the future, Microsoft hopes that its place will be in search, he said.