Microsoft's Walkaway Wins Investors' Favor

The stock has been down significantly due, at least in part, to the pending deal. "The decision to drop its offer for Yahoo!, at least for now, suggests that Microsoft has remained more price disciplined than investors may have feared," Friar wrote. The company is an investment banking client of Goldman Sachs.

"Yahoo! threatened to undertake something of a scorched earth strategy in defense of a hostile tender, essentially threatening to destroy the company's value to MSFT," Sanford Bernstein analysts wrote Monday. "In this light, we are ... actually are quite satisfied with Microsoft's decision and decision-making."

In recent years, some suitors have taken out big targets in spite of huge opposition both at the target and internally. OracleORCL CEO Larry Ellison ultimately won PeopleSoft in a bloody hostile takeover. And as CEO of Hewlett-PackardHPQ, Carly Fiorina successfully engineered the buyout of Compaq -- albeit at the ultimate expense of her job -- in spite of a bruising internal fight that split the H-P board publicly.