This morning Redmond announced its biggest acquisition to date.

Its target is the online advertising company aQuantive. This Seattle based ad giant owns Atlas, Avenue A | Razorfish and DRIVEpm and has more then 2600 souls on board.

Microsoft's CFO Chris Liddell claims that the bidding was competitive, and the bloated share price does seem to prove that. The deal will end up costing Microsoft about 6 billion dollars, as the Vole paid $66.50 per share. This is an 85,5% premium on Thursday's closing price of $35.87, and unlike me, some people had a great day at the market.

Aquantive shareholder should probably thank Google for its DoubleClick deal for this one, and the will probably be finalized in the first half of 2008 due to regulation issues.