5 Companies Microsoft Should Buy

Tough luck, Microsoft .

Yahoo! has reportedly rebuffed its advances for what would have been one of the most talked-about mergers of the year.

Oh, well. Maybe it's all for the best. Few seemed to think it was a very good idea anyway, and most of the benefits from owning Yahoo! can be had more cheaply by forging partnerships with each other.

Still, it can't be easy sitting around with $28 billion in cash burning a hole in your pocket. So what can Microsoft do? Here's a list of five companies worth its money -- none of them may make perfect sense, but they all make a lot more sense than buying Yahoo!.

And they're all cheaper than Yahoo's $40 billion market cap. The first four combined are worth less than $20 billion, while the fifth is pricey, but could help it break out on the Net.

1. iRobot(IRBT Quote)
Market value: $377 million
Price-to-sales value: 2.0
Price-to-book value: 4.2

Don't laugh. Microsoft doesn't talk a lot about robotics, but it's deadly serious about it. It sees the PC boom reoccurring in the nascent robotics industry, and it wants its software to be the standard that unites all robots, just as Windows united most PCs.

	Who else should Microsoft buy? Answer Here

Last month, Microsoft posted its Robotics Studio software on its site, free for anyone to download, and included support for the Create software from -- that's right -- iRobot.