News Corp chief executive Rupert Murdoch has indicated that his company is unwilling to make a bid for Yahoo! to help it fend off the advances of Microsoft.Speaking at the annual Bear Stearns media conference yesterday (March 10th), Mr Murdoch said that the company was "not going to get into a fight with Microsoft" as the software giant "has a lot more money than [News Corp]".
The comments followed reports that News Corp and Yahoo! had been in talks over a possible merger between certain of the former's web-based assets - including MySpace - and Jerry Yang's company.
However, this news had been greeted with scepticism from investors and analysts on Wall Street, who said such a deal would be unlikely to meet the same level of value offered by Microsoft's $41.4 billion bid.
Yahoo! has been seen to be making efforts to seek out an alternative to a Microsoft takeover since the bid was first made.
Reuters reports that sources familiar with the matter indicated last week that Yahoo! is currently in talks with Time Warner over a possible merger with the latter's AOL business.
Google chief executive Eric Schmidt is also thought to have proposed a partnership with Yahoo! as one way of evading Microsoft's bid last month, the Guardian reports.
Such a collaboration could see Yahoo! outsourcing some of its advertising and search functions to Google while focusing on areas such as mobile programs, content sharing and social networking.
