It’s been ‘revealed’ that Microsoft was the mystery suitor interested in acquiring Salesforce.com Inc., but the deal reportedly collapsed after the latter company’s CEO Marc Benioff rejected the offer.

Talks between the two companies reached a “serious level”, CNBC reported, citing anonymous sources.   Microsoft reportedly offered an eye-watering $55 billion to acquire the San Francisco-based cloud-computing firm. However, Benioff held out for a reported $70 billion, which Microsoft wasn’t prepared to offer, leading to a stalemate.

Salesforce is currently valued at some $49 billion, CNBC reports. Microsoft could theoretically afford to buy Salesforce because it’s said to have more than $95 billion in cash and cash-equivalents it could have used to fund the move. Nevertheless, it seems Microsoft wasn’t prepared to pay over the odds for what would have been one of the tech industry’s largest ever acquisitions.

Rumors of Salesforce being acquired first surfaced last month. Not surprisingly, neither it nor Microsoft was prepared to comment on the speculation.

Salesforce commands a high price tag because its one of the biggest cloud computing companies around. It’s a pioneer of customer relationship management, or CRM, which companies use to manage their sales efforts. Just last week, Salesforce reported $1.51 billion in revenues for the first quarter, and at the same time forecast sales for the entire year of $6.55 billion.

As for Microsoft, it’s still playing a cloud catch-up game, even as more and more of its business shifts to its Azure cloud-computing platform and its cloud-based Office 365 suite. The company, with its mobile-first, cloud-first strategy, is betting its future on services delivered over the Internet, as evidenced by its decision to give Windows away for free, on the assumption it can gain more from selling services related to its OS, rather than asking for money to use the software itself.

Had Microsoft successfully acquired Salesforce, the deal would have all but cemented its cloud business future.

Microsoft’s failed bid comes at a time when tech acquisitions are becoming ever-more expensive. For example, Facebook grabbed headlines with its acquisition of Instagram for a ‘mere’ $1 billion, and since then it’s gone on to acquire the virtual-reality startup Oculus VR, LLC for $2.5 billion, plus WhatsApp Inc. for $19 billion.

Had Microsoft’s bid been accepted, it would have been the company’s largest ever acquisition, dwarfing its $8.5 billion purchase of Skype in 2011. Back in 2008, the company also reportedly tried to acquire Yahoo! Inc., for $45 billion under old CEO Steve Ballmer, but that bid was also turned down.

The record sum spent on a tech acquisition still belongs to AOL-Time Warner merger way back in 2000. The original purchase price was reported to be $162 billion, but AOL’s declining share price saw the deal capped at $106 billion by the time it was completed in 2001.

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