Bartz: Who Do You Take Me For–Jerry Yang?

What’s Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz’s latest thinking on a search deal with Microsoft? Your guess is as good as any because Bartz isn’t saying. Asked at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference yesterday whether she favors such a deal, Bartz said she prefers to discuss it in boardrooms, not auditoriums or the media. “I am not going to negotiate with my 55,000 favorite friends,” she quipped. “We’re going to negotiate as companies negotiate–and that’s privately. If something happens, you’ll know it then. Until then, there is no comment.”

No milquetoast, that Bartz.

Her remarks come as an interesting counterpoint to those of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who clearly has no such compunctions about public negotiations. “You all know that I would like to figure out how to pool somehow Microsoft and Yahoo,” he said during a strategic update meeting with Wall Street analysts last week. “I’m not talking about doing an acquisition, blah, blah, blah, back to search deals, blah, blah, blah, I don’t know if anything is going to happen. I’ll short-circuit the whole conversation, but the fact of the matter is, these two guys [Microsoft and Yahoo] should somehow figure out how to get together and create more competition for [Google]. And I’m hoping perhaps that that’s a reasonable conversation to have with new management at Yahoo as Carol comes onboard.”

What a pair these two are going to make, eh?