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courtesy:www.blogs.abcnews.com

However, since then, intense pressure from Yahoo shareholders, and in particular investor Carl Icahn's effort to dump the Yahoo board has led Yang and the rest of the Yahoo's board to reconsider the whole deal.

In fact, Yahoo approached Microsoft a few weeks later about resuming negotiations, going so far as to say that the company would be willing to sell itself for something close to what Microsoft had offered in the first place. But this time, it was Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer who walked away- timing, it seems, is the imperative here.

However according to the IT Blog TechCrunch, in a move that says its not really over until the fat lady sings, Yahoo in a letter to shareholders said that its agreement to outsource some search advertising to Google does not preclude a sale of the company to Microsoft.

If Microsoft was successful in its buyout Yahoo, the writing may be on the wall for local and embattled search portal Ninemsn, a Microsoft and PBL Media joint venture.

Rumblings were heard early in June, as Tony Faure, the CEO of ninemsn, resigned from his position, in what some media analysts read as the inability of Faure to push through his ideas against the entrenched culture at PBL- a media company whose ruthless machinations are regularly played out in public.

Yahoo!7 for its part, would be in a prime position to capitalise with its new owner, however Ninemsn, on the other hand, would be in a totally different, and perhaps unenviable position.