Flabbergasted by aQuantive (AQNT) Price

I could not believe the news this morning that Microsoft (MSFT) was buying aQuantive (AQNT) for about $6 billion. Here's why I'm flabbergasted:

1. I sold AQNT shares in March for $26.38
2. Acquisition price is about double what Google (GOOG) paid for Doubleclick (DCLK)
3. Microsoft is buying an SEM firm (Avenue A | Razorfish)

The first item is what annoys me the most. I bought some AQNT stock in 2004 @ $7.58 so was pretty pleased with a 248% gain on my investment when I sold AQNT @ $26.38. Seeing the jump in the stock price this morning was exasperating. Sigh. The second item is pretty amazing. Clearly, they were in a bidding war. The third item, though, makes me wonder what they're really after.

Interesting to note, too, when doing a Google search this morning for aQuantive, I saw the new universal search UI in action:



Note that the fourth search result is a collection of news results and not a web page.

For more details on the MSFT-AQNT deal, see TechCrunch. I wonder what SearchQuant will think of this latest SEM valuation. Well, congratulations to Chris Boggs!

Apogee Tags (made w/ TagBuildr): aqnt, aquantive, msft, microsoft, goog, google, dclk, doubleclick, web advertising, search marketing, universal search, chris boggs