According to a report in The New York Post, Capital Research and Management, a giant investment company that owns 11.4 percent of Yahoo, met with Steve Ballmer yesterday to find out just how high Microsoft is willing to go in its effort to acquire Yahoo. Since Microsoft first announced their $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo a week ago, shares of the software giant have slipped around 10 percent, meaning that the offer has lost around $4 billion of value.
Over the past week, the general consensus has been that many top Yahoo execs aren’t particularly excited about the prospect of joining Microsoft. Nonetheless, no other bidders have emerged, and the only alternative seems to be outsourcing search to Google, which would drive up Yahoo’s revenue in the near-term, but essentially mean that the company is throwing in the towel in its effort to be a serious search competitor.