Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer said on Friday the company had never seen buying Yahoo as strategic, and dropping the bid meant it now had $50 billion to spend on other acquisitions.
"Yahoo was never the strategy we were pursuing," he told a packed hall at a technology conference in Moscow.
"We will spend money on some acquisitions. You can do a whole lot of things with 50 billion dollars," he added.
Microsoft walked away from a proposal to acquire Internet media company Yahoo for $47.5 billion, or $33 per share, after Yahoo rebuffed the offer earlier this month, saying it would only settle for $37 per share.
(Msnbc.com is a Microsoft-NBC Universal joint venture.)
In Israel this week Ballmer said Microsoft was now not in talks to acquire Yahoo, but was looking at other types of deals with the U.S. No. 2 search engine.
Microsoft has already made an offer to buy Yahoo's search business and take a minority stake in the Web firm, a source familiar with discussions recently told Reuters.
Ballmer also dismissed suggestions Microsoft's Silverlight technology would merge with its rival Adobe System Inc.'s Flash technology to combat competition from a potential merger between Adobe and old Microsoft rival Apple Inc.
"We compete with Flash ... I'm open-minded, but there's really no discussion of merging with Adobe. Developers should all learn Silverlight," he said.
The Internet start-ups sector, which has recently seen a new class of instant-messaging tools, is not being used to its full potential, Ballmer added.
"There are many businesses that are in some senses under-appreciated by the market," he said, particularly healthcare start-ups.
"There's an ageing population — it's one of the biggest-growing parts of the world economy."
