Why settle for $13 a share ?? wait till the stock complete tanks, then offer to buy them out just for their debt .

Altavista has just hired Yang. They hope that Yang will turns things around for them

dumb ass..

I refuse to believe that Ballmer's smart enough to pull that off

Back in 2001 or something Fast sold off their alltheweb.com search engine to Yahoo. Last year Microsoft bought Fast.

Yahoo! has been a second-rate search engine for many years anyway. MS should launch their own services instead of trying to buy Yahoo, which would devalue Yahoo yet further, to the point at which they'd probably be trying to give the company away.

The only people I feel sorry for are the shareholders of Yahoo, who can only stand to lose out, as I cannot see any way realistically that their shares will ever be valued at $33 again.

maybe not steve but his corporate team will have adviced it for 2 reasons

one. Alot of they investors were venture capatalists looking to make a buck and it looked like microsoft had offered them a way to make that buck plus some extra. this was bound to make the board nervous of split the broad some in favor some not. especially after yahoo had brought some profitless start-ups recently that had no benifit

Two. if they except you get they webmail users search users and advertising revenue can trim out the fat and become a google rival in the Advertising field or argueing amoung broad members causes the share price to drop makeing them cheaper for a second attempt to buy or causing them to go broke and you gain a market spot that way.

failed purchase attempts nearly always cause the company being brought to have a share price drop a sad fact of life.

and with the bad moves yahoo have made it's not surprise they would now be looking to sell themselfs

Who owns Lycos these days?