Microsoft still not buying Yahoo, for now

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Microsoft really isn’t trying to buy Yahoo anymore, at least not right now, Chairman Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer said late last night in a rare joint appearance at Dow Jones’ All Things D conference in Carlsbad.

The pair, who generally are kept from being in the same place outside of Redmond, Wash., for security reasons, stuck to the script Microsoft has been using for a while. That is, they are exploring a smaller partnership with the Internet power, they aren’t bidding for the whole caboodle and they reserve the right to bid for said caboodle in the future (here’s video from the conference).

But the men gave off an air of finality to the situation. That surprised some in the audience who had seen the standoff as a tactical ploy, especially now that the Yahoo board has come under intense pressure from Carl Icahn and other activist shareholders to get back to the table.

‘I’m not frustrated at all,’ Ballmer said. ‘We couldn’t agree on price, basically.’

‘I still think it’s a scale business,’ he said. ‘We must think there is something of mutual benefit,’ or Microsoft wouldn’t be trying to cut a new deal.

Under steady needling by interviewers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, Ballmer and Gates, in their own pro-Microsoft way, also conceded that the latest version of Windows, Vista, wasn’t all that they’d hoped.

‘We have a culture that’s very much about `We need to do better,’’ said Gates, who has one more month to go as a full-time Microsoft employee. ‘Vista has given us more opportunity.’

That line brought a chorus of laughter from many in the audience. Dell founder Michael Dell, whose computers rely on Microsoft’s operating systems, was seated near the front. He didn’t come close to smiling.

-- Joseph Menn