By now, everyone knows that Microsoft is doing a hostile-takeover Apache dance with Yahoo, and Yahoo wants no part of it. Saturday was Microsoft's big bad deadline [1], after which the Empire has promised to launch it's attack. So, where are we?

The Microsofties were out in force last week, with CFO Chris Liddell using Microsoft's quarterly-results conference call to reiterate the company's plans for a hostile takeover [2] — though it could have just been his way of drawing attention away from Big Evil's depressing numbers [3], with a 24% decrease in Windows sales, a three-cent-per-share drop in income, and predictions that the next quarter won't be much better. All this just days after Yahoo announced better-than-expected numbers [4], seemingly proving the Yahoo board's assertion that $31 per share undervalues the company.

The interesting part, as we noted briefly last week, isn't that Microsoft is sticking to its guns on price — it's the weasel-words starting to trickle out from above. Just as they're supposedly heating up the irons for a boardroom coup, the line from Microsoft's execs is starting to sound a lot like the irons are for making waffles [5]. Quoth Ballmer: "[W]e’ll move forward without a merger." Liddell is even better — he goes weasel in the middle of a threat: "These alternatives clearly include taking an offer to Yahoo shareholders or to withdraw our proposal and focus on other opportunities."

This doesn't sound like a company certain of victory to us...
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Justin Ryan is News Editor [6] for LinuxJournal.com.
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