While the news of the Amazon-Audible acquisition was interesting, the BIG BUZZ around town this past week was Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid to takeover Yahoo!

I have to give Michael Arrington (TechCrunch) full credit for the mega-scoop and talking about this issue just a mere few days before the announcement. In a separate post (after the announcement), he also offers an interesting look at what an MS-Yahoo might look like.

Anyway, so you can hear it straight from the horses mouth, here’s the internal email that was sent to MS employees from Steve Ballmer (CEO, Microsoft) announcing the bid.

I guess it was only a matter of time before this happened, since Yahoo already turned down a previous bid about a year ago and their stocks have been sliding steadily downward over the past year or so.

Of course, no sooner had this bid been made public than all the other big players have started scrambling, and rumors abound regarding potential competing bids, such as News Corp — which had previously been in talks with Yahoo about a Yahoo-MySpace merger.

OK, now to top it all off, the other 500-pound gorilla — Google — has entered the picture and called Microsoft’s offer a “hostile bid” and discusses the importance of preserving Yahoo’s independence form MS for the future of the Internet. Here’s a taster from the Google Blog:

So Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation…

Could the acquisition of Yahoo! allow Microsoft — despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses — to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet? In addition, Microsoft plus Yahoo! equals an overwhelming share of instant messaging and web email accounts. And between them, the two companies operate the two most heavily trafficked portals on the Internet. Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors’ email, IM, and web-based services? Policymakers around the world need to ask these questions — and consumers deserve satisfying answers.

Well, this piece of news is RED HOT right now and there’s just too many sources too follow. Just go to Techmeme, TechCrunch or News.com and watch it develop — I’m sure it will be the hot topic for quite a while yet.

I guess acquisitions are in the air again!