Where the Chickens Would Come Home to Roost, If Yahoo and Microsoft Ever Did Do a Search Deal
In Yahoo’s fourth-quarter earnings conference call earlier this week, new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz went out of her way to ho-hum all over the possibility of a search deal with Microsoft.
She even went as far as to not even mention its name, when she referred to the laggard third player in market share.
And Bartz also tried to make it seem as if a recent meeting between Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer and Yahoo (YHOO) Chairman Roy Bostock-as well as Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes, who presides over the AOL online service-was fiction. (It was not.)
Of course, it was all cooked up and well rehearsed by Bartz, who knows how to play the expectations game as well as anyone else, especially as she endeavors to come up to speed on the various prospects for Yahoo going forward.
One person who has been close to the situation said it best: "Anyone would have said the same regardless of their true position at this point."
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