The board of directors of Yahoo! has decided that the sum of Euro30,000 million offered by Microsoft for buying the search engine this February and has rejected the offer. The staff of the company has been of paramount importance in a decision where they had the last word due to the stock options policy of Yahoo!
It is expected that Microsoft will raise its offer between 12% and 25%, a fact that would be appreciated willingly by Yahoo!. Meanwhile, the Google search engine, which is the leader of the search engine market, has offered an agreement to Yahoo! with the aim of preventing Microsoft from being able to lead the Internet market as well. In this line, Yahoo! wants to resume negotiations with American Online (AOL) to reach a merger of the two Internet companies.