[Update: Bloomberg News reports Microsoft is “nowhere close” to making a Yahoo bid. AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher likewise throws cold water on the idea.]
It’s déjà vu all over again — the tech story line that doesn’t seem to want to go away.
Reuters reports this afternoon that Microsoft is contemplating another acquisition bid for Yahoo, after running into a wall multiple times when it attempted to do the same thing more than three years ago.
Quoting a “high-ranking Microsoft executive,” the news service says the company hasn’t made a decision yet on whether to bid, and notes that the company’s executives are split over what to do.
Microsoft’s original Yahoo bid was unsolicited, and ultimately unwanted, but Yahoo is now “readying financial pitch books for potential buyers” at a market value of $18 billion, according to the report. That’s a long ways from February 2008, when Microsoft bid more than $44 billion for Yahoo.
The situation at Yahoo has been increasingly in flux since the ouster in September of the company’s CEO, Carol Bartz, whose tenure included signing a large-scale search and advertising partnership with Microsoft that includes the Redmond company’s Bing search engine powering Yahoo’s search results.
No comment yet from Microsoft on the Reuters report.
