Steve Ballmer to Jerry Yang: I’m Not Buying You

On Wednesday, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang suggested that “the best thing for Microsoft to do is to buy Yahoo.” That’s not going to happen, says Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, speaking at a conference in Sydney. But Ballmer does leave the door open for a search deal. FT:

We made an offer…We made another offer. It was clear that [Yahoo] doesn’t want to sell the business to us and we moved on. We tried at one point to do a partnership around search, not an acquisition. And that didn’t work either, and we moved on…and they moved on…We are not interested in going back and relooking at an acquisition. I don’t know why they would be either, frankly. They turned us down at $33 a share…I’m sure there are still opportunities for some kind of partnership around search.”