Steve Ballmer Snooping For Info On Bartz

• Very interesting that in just the first week of Yahoo announcing their new executive, Carol Bartz, the company’s chairman met Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer at the Time Warner Center for lunch. A tipster reported to Gawker, spotting the two:

On my way down the elevator, I was stopped on the 5th floor and in walk Roy Bostock (runs Yahoo’s board) and Steve Ballmer. Kind hellos were exchanged. As we entered the lobby they both walked out and seemingly proceeded to lunch together.

• Is Ballmer snooping around or does he already know what is about to happen? Or is this the doing of Bostock, who was in charge of putting Jerry Yang back in charge and assisted in turning down the original $45 billion MSFT/YHOO acquisition.He might be meeting with Ballmer to set things right by taking the matter of a sale into his own hands. Many speculations with little substance, but the important point is the deal between Yahoo and Microsoft is not over forever Microsoft puts too much time and money into search to be hovering at less than a 10% market share in the industry. For Microsoft, it’s close to embarrassing.
• Now that Bartz is in place, who has not taken the job to come in and be the long term Yahoo CEO (just look at her compensation), we will see a deal start to boil sometime in the next 6 months. Once Bartz does what see was brought into do; clean the management mess up, prioritize products and put a muzzle on Jerry Yang, then things will start to move quickly. It was one of my predictions of 2009 that a deal with Microsoft and Yahoo will be back. It’s very rare we’re wrong here at tinyComb.

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Tagged as: ballmer, snopping