Ballmer: Yahoo Buyout Is Not Gonna Happen

Sorry, Jerry, a buyout’s not gonna happen. That’s the message MSFT CEO Steve Ballmer made clear at a business luncheon in Sydney, Reuters says.

“We made an offer, we made another offer … We moved on,”Ballmer said. “We tried at one point to do a partnership around search … and that didn’t work either, and we moved on and they moved on. We are not interested in going back and re-looking at an acquisition. I don’t know why they would be either, frankly.”

But he did leave the door open for a potential search deal, something some analysts say Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) will have to consider if it wants to stay alive despite the demise of its search partnership with Google (NSDQ: GOOG). Ballmer’s definitive statement came after Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang suggested that MSFT buy Yahoo during the Web 2.0 conference yesterday.

Check out mocoNews for the search deal with *Verizon* that MSFT is trying to snatch from Google.

Photo Credit: DBegley