MacRumors.com

CNBC reports that Microsoft has made a hostile takeover bid for Yahoo for $44.6 billion in stock and cash.

"We discussed a number of alternatives ranging from commercial partnerships to a merger proposal, which you rejected," Microsoft told Yahoo in a letter.

"While a commercial partnership may have made sense at one time, Microsoft believes that the only alternative now is the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo that we are proposing," it said.

Microsoft's press release provides some more details:

“Our lives, our businesses, and even our society have been progressively transformed by the Web, and Yahoo! has played a pioneering role by building compelling, high-scale services and infrastructure,” said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft. “The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our own.”