Following its keen interest in Yahoo, Microsoft is taking the next step by bidding a minority stake. Microsoft, along with private equity firm Silver Lake and Andreesen Horowitz bid $16.60 per share for a minority stake in Yahoo. This bid is in tune with Microsoft’s interest to own Yahoo. Just a few days back, it participated in the bidding process for the search company. In fact, Google was also competing it in the process, so that it can use Yahoo to promote its own efforts, including Google Plus.

This isn’t the first time these industry giants looked into acquiring Yahoo. Back in 2008, Microsoft had a failed attempt of acquiring Yahoo for $47.5 billion. But this time, Microsoft finally succeeded in its efforts.  By acting as the backdoor financier, it will retain a monthly audience of almost 700 million unique visitors.

Besides, there are several other developments in the works, including the support of Agari, the new anti-phishing service. Microsoft, along with Google, Yahoo and AOL have joined forces with an anti-fraud startup, which is launching tomorrow, to help keep phishing messages out of users’ inboxes. Agari, a California based company, helps look for patterns that indicate phishing attacks. It collects and analyzes data, provides it to about 50 e-commerce, financial and social network customers, including Facebook and YouSendIt. It further pushes out authentication policies to the e-mail providers whenever they see an attack is happening.

“Facebook can go into the Agari console and see charts and graphs of all the activity going on in their e-mail channel (on their domains and third-party solutions) and see when an attack is going on in a bar chart of spam hitting Yahoo,” for instance, Daniel Raskin, vice president of marketing for Agari, told CNET in an interview. “They receive a real-time alert and they can construct a policy to push out to carriers (that says) when you see this thing happening don’t deliver it, reject it.”

Taking a look at another development, Microsoft recently expanded the mobile capabilities of its cloud-based Office 365 software Tuesday to expand its presence in the smartphone and tablet apps market. It has added more than 30 mobile updates to Office 365, including one that provides Windows Phone 7.5 devices with one-tap access to documents via an Office 365 sharing feature.