Gates on Yahoo: What part of 'no' don't you understand?

Bill Gates must be thrilled the day is near when his every sound bite about Microsoft won't be subjected to something akin to biblical exegesis. (Starting in July, he goes to work full time for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Truth be told, we'll likely continue to put his comments about Microsoft under the magnifying glass. But he'll likely keep them to a minimum.)

(Credit: Microsoft)

So it was that on a visit to Japan, Gates cleared up a phony controversy over remarks he made a day earlier about Microsoft's future acquisition plans, sans Yahoo. "Now at this point Microsoft is focused on its independent strategy," Gates said during a news conference in Tokyo.

The AP's correspondent paraphrased Gates' comments to write up the story's opener:

TOKYO--Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said Wednesday the company isn't pursuing other deals following the withdrawal of its $47.5 billion takeover bid for Yahoo.

I wonder what it's like to have the media hang on every syllable out of your mouth. So it is that the blabosphere had some understandable fun with the apparent reversal that wasn't. In South Korea on Tuesday, Gates said Steve Ballmer would be entrusted with making "key decisions" after the collapse of the negotiations to buy Yahoo, adding the boilerplate kicker, "I wouldn't rule out some partnerships but we don't have anything imminent there."

Yeah, duh.

Gates is a quote magnet for wire reporters under deadline to come up with a headline for the home office. Was Microsoft making its corporate development strategy up on the fly? Not really. I'd be stunned if Microsoft decided to swear off more acquisitions for any prolonged length of time. (By the way, Wednesday's Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft's bankers have made overtures to Facebook.) Might management decide to take another run at Yahoo sometime later this year? It depends how well Jerry Yang performs as a solo act. If Yahoo stumbles, it's in Microsoft's obvious interest to let Yang twist in the wind until pressure from outraged Yahoo shareholders forces him back to the negotiating table.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

[fred dunn]

When will the press give up on this?
Microsoft is not going back to the table at all until Yahoo is in more trouble than they are now and if that happens it definitely will be a discount buy. Not at the ridiculous level it was at.
Yahoo, Yang, the Board, and the shareholders are going to look back on this as a lost opportunity for a windfall on their investments. The only place Yahoo is going without MS is down. Of course they could always outsource their search to Google but then what's left for Yahoo?

I just hope and pray that MS just continues to build up their "Live" presence and hire up Yahoo's talent as they flee like rats off a sinking ship.

[JCPayne]

WOW. So Microsoft is actually saying that they've been defeated??? THAT is rare... You hardly ever see that.. Microsoft once upon a time put AOL on notice that they would buy them or bury them... Well they haven't surpassed AOL in customers yet..... Netscape was given a similar line and Microsoft won that.. Apple too got a taste of that and was defeated until Bill Gates bailed Apple out... But anyway... Netscape wanted to be defeated because I still hold to the fact that Netscape ran slower than IE thus they never could win that battle because IE was windows and windows was IE.... As I said then--- Netscape needed to look at settling the score by creating an alternate Windows shell to Explorer.exe Something like LiteStep or NextStep or Afterstep.... In so doing they could tightly integrate Netscape into that and THUS Netscape would be already loaded in memory when the computer booted the shell. And you wouldn't have redundancy because the computer would already be running IE in the background and thus to run Netscape on top of that you're literally using the same Computer resources twice the accomplish the same websurfing... So anyway Netscape gave their market share away because they weren't committed really towards remaining an active player and they ended up giving away their market share to Windows/IE in the end.

[Jeff in Austin]

Give Bill some credit for walking away fron Yahoo - I quit doing PPC on Yahoo last summer after realizing that my real estate website http://www.home-deals.net and my Denver website http://www.jeffboyce.net were getting about 25% spam - fraud clicks from Yahoo. Gates should NOT buy Yahoo until they clean up their mess and off consumers a better organic search platform too!