Microsoft decided to walk on the Yahoo! deal. After the sharp Yahoo! stock decline Monday, expect many shareholder lawsuits. The press release contained the following open letter to Jerry Yang.

Dear Jerry:

After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.

Since buying out Yahoo! seemed too expensive, Microsoft is back again with another offer. Microsoft's Statement:

After hearing a few people mention the NBA finals I went over to Yahoo! Sports to check it out. The Celtics are ahead of the Lakers 1 game to 0. Given the history of that rivalry it is no surprise that decent NBA Finals Tickets are selling for over $1,000 and courtside tickets fetch $20,000 or more. Yahoo! paid the editorial costs to create great content relevant for this high profit margin niche, and what do they do with it? They waste it.

From their press release:

Yahoo! has guys like Jeremy Zawodny marketing their fresh new search platform, and yet they remain behind the competition. Microsoft jumped into the search field way later than Yahoo! did, so why is it that Microsoft rankings for well promoted sites often roughly track Google rankings, while Yahoo! still has yet to give many of these sites an opportunity to rank?

Here are some examples of what I am talking about (with URLs expunged to protect the guilty)...