Ballmer was turning down, with customary firmness, a plea by Yang for Microsoft to make a renewed bid for the troubled Internet company. "We are not interested in going back and re-looking at an acquisition," said Ballmer. "We made an offer, we made another offer -- it was clear Yahoo didn't want to sell the business, and we moved on."
He was responding to news that Yang had said at an industry conference in the US that Microsoft's best option was still to buy Yahoo and the board was now willing to sell the company.
Yang's problem is that he and the board rejected an offer of US$33 a share from Microsoft, for a total of $47 billion, earlier this year. Since then Yahoo shares have plunged on Friday they dropped US$1.76 to $12.20, after Google backed out of a proposed online-advertising partnership.
"To this day, I would say that the best thing for Microsoft to do is to buy Yahoo," Yang said last week at a conference in San Francisco. "I don't think that is a bad idea at all.''
