Is Ballmer playing hardball, here, or is it another of your stock picks going down the toilet?
Yahoo Said to Continue Talks With Time Warner as Options Fade
By Gillian Wee and Crayton Harrison
Nov. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Yahoo! Inc., facing dimming prospects for a takeover by Microsoft Corp., is continuing discussions to buy Time Warner Inc.'s AOL business, people familiar with the matter said.
Yahoo and Time Warner executives have met in the past few weeks and continue to negotiate over terms, said two people familiar with the situation. Time Warner would hand over AOL's advertising business to Yahoo in exchange for a stake in the combined company, said the people, who declined to be named because the talks aren't public.
A deal would bolster Yahoo's position in the market for so- called display advertising and add subscribers for services such as e-mail and instant messaging. Yahoo and AOL would need to cut as many as 3,000 jobs for the deal to pay off, said Jeff Lindsay, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein in New York.
``It's difficult and high-risk -- a merger between companies in similar activities but with very different cultures,'' Lindsay said. ``It's not the best deal by far.''
Differences remain between the two sides and an agreement may not materialize, two other people familiar with the discussions said.
Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer said yesterday that acquisition talks with Yahoo are ``done,'' contributing to a 21 percent decline in Yahoo's shares. Still, Ballmer said yesterday that a partnership between the companies in the Web-search market is an ``interesting possibility.''
