After three dramatic months, Microsoft has officially ended its bid to take over Internet giant Yahoo because the companies failed to agree on a price. According to reports, Microsoft’s withdrawal from the proposed deal follows a breakdown in talks Saturday morning: at the meeting in Seattle, Microsoft offered to increase its offer from $31 per share to $33 per share—which would sweeten the deal by about $5 billion—but Yahoo reportedly wouldn’t accept a price below $37 a share. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and platforms and services president Kevin Johnson attended the meeting, as did Yahoo co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo.
In a statement released Saturday evening, Microsoft indicated it will not attempt a hostile takeover of Yahoo by nominating its own slate of directors or taking its offer directly to shareholders. “[It] is clear to me that it is not sensible for Microsoft to take our offer directly to your shareholders,” Ballmer wrote. “This approach would necessarily involve a protracted proxy contest and eventually an exchange offer. Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft.”
In a separate statement, Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock responded: “From the beginning of this process, our independent board and our management have been steadfast in our belief that Microsoft’s offer undervalued the company and we are pleased that so many of our shareholders joined us in expressing that view.”
The two companies will continue to go their separate ways, but the three-month dance may have some long-term consequences for both companies. Industry watchers see Microsoft making a series of smaller acquisitions—of course, compared to $40 billion, almost any acquisition will be smaller—to bolster its online advertising and search marketing businesses. Yahoo, in turn, may find unexpected synergies have developed as a result of its two-week experiment running Google ads on Yahoo sites. “This process has underscored our unique and valuable strategic position,” wrote Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang in a statement. “With the distraction of Microsoft’s unsolicited proposal now behind us, we will be able to focus all of our energies on executing the most important transition in our history so that we can maximize our potential to the benefit of our shareholders, employees, partners and users.”
Of course, Microsoft may also come courting Yahoo again…especially if Jerry Yang can’t deliver promised revenues to shareholders within a few quarters. If Yahoo’s stock price sags low enough, Yahoo investors may swoon over a renewed Microsoft takeover effort—even at a substantially lower price.
Speech-to-text apps have flooded the App Store, making it easier than ever to type on our Macs with just our voice. I have previously covered one such app called TypeWhisper. However, there has been a dearth of good text-to-speech models, and most of the good ones are locked behind a subscription.
Ollama, an open-source app that lets you run local AI models on your computer, wants to change that. It works on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and your prompts are never stored or used for training.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).