Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, chairman Roy Bostock, and the rest of the Yahoo's board met on Friday. After reviewing the company's options — begin negotiations with Microsoft, merge Web properties with AOL, or outsource search advertising to Google — the board went with a perhaps underhyped fourth option. It postponed any decision and decided to meet again, the New York Times reports. Maybe with AOL, Microsoft, or Google representatives at the table. We'll see. Meanwhile, Yahoo executives want reporters to know that Yang should just hurry up and sell to Microsoft. Overlord-welcoming readers, by a margin of 2-to-1, agree.

When a partnership like Google and Salesforce.com's gets announced so publicly, it's a safe bet that the message is meant for investors and rivals, not customers. Look at the substance of their new partnership: Salesforce.com for Google Apps amounts to adding a tab to link the two Web-based services. Salesforce.com helps companies organize their customer leads and sales; Google Apps offers simplified and hence limited Web versions of familiar office-productivity apps like Microsoft Word and Excel. Add 2 + 2, and you get 4, not 5, as Google and Salesforce would have you believe.

At Capital Research & Management, an investment management firm and longtime Yahoo shareholder, media-savvy stockpicker Gordon Crawford has raised its stake in the company to more than 16 percent, from $4 billion to $6 billion at current prices, some time in the past three months. The stock's chart strongly suggests that his buy came after Microsoft's bid sent Yahoo shares soaring. What that means: Crawford believes Microsoft will succeed in its bid for Yahoo, but only after raising its price. That's a fair turnabout from his earlier concerns that a higher price for Yahoo would mean losses from his firm's stake in Microsoft that outweighed gains from its Yahoo position. Capital's huge bet on Yahoo means that CEO Steve Ballmer's hand is weakened in resisting calls to up Microsoft's offer.

Yesterday, at a luncheon with several dozen VP-level minions Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang hosted tried to explain the reasoning behind a potential deal with AOL and Time Warner. Didn't go over so well. But while many of these invitees were happy to later share their horror at the idea of merging AOL and Yahoo Web properties, none managed to grow a pair and tell Yang. Now is your chance people. Should Yahoo merge with Microsoft or take Time Warner's money? Tell us in our latest Valleywag poll.

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang hosted a lunch for top management yesterday and tried to sell the company's overstuffed ranks of EVPs and SVPs on a mashup with AOL. No one bought it, reports BoomTown's Kara Swisher. "Look, Microsoft would not be my first choice either," one exec told Swisher. "But AOL is not even my third." Another exec said: "I cannot believe they would put our amazing assets with those who we don't really respect, for the most part, and think that's OK." Reportedly, none of the VPs at Yang's luncheon bothered speak up — the cardinal rule at Yahoo these days being not to offend Yahoo's oversensitive founder. But most want him to hurry up and close what's seen as an inevitable deal with Microsoft.

Can Microsoft's army of programmers write software for the Web? Judging by a spate of recent outages, no. Hotmail, Messenger, and other services targeted at developers and partners have broken down recently. Which is bizarre: Writing an operating system is a vastly more complex affair than coding a website. "Like war versus paintball," says Ted Dziuba, the programmer and former editor of startup-debunker blog Uncov. Therein lies Microsoft's problem. Once you've trained to fight a real war, you can forget about winning at paintball.

While Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Yahoo's Jerry Yang exchange angry letters over the fate of their companies, AOL CEO Randy Falco has this for his legions:

At MySpace headquarters in Beverly Hills, playbooks are stacked on desks as Rupert Murdoch's minions desperately try to make the numbers on a Yahoo deal work. Murdoch's News Corp. has joined forces with Microsoft in an effort to counter a deal with the mogul's old enemy, Time Warner. Google, which all old-line media companies fear, is approaching a bid with languorous rigor, running a small test of placing its ads on some Yahoo pages. It's all rather depressing.

Analysts say that allowing Google to serve its ads on Yahoo search pages would immediately boost search revenues by a third and Yahoo's stock by $5 a share. Problem is, Microsoft's top lawyer, Brad Smith, already promised to make a regulatory stink about such a deal, saying it would give Google control over 90 percent of the search advertising market. But a source involved with the discussions between Yahoo and Google says there's a way Yahoo could steer clear of antitrust trouble.

As Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, AOL and News Corp. go at it tag team-style, PaidContent rounded up Wall Street's opinion on the proceedings. The bullet-list version, below.

News Corp. is now discussing a possible joint takeover bid for Yahoo with Microsoft, according to unnamed sources cited by the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, Yahoo is now discussing combining Internet operations with Time Warner-owned America Online as part of a three-fold move to stave off the takeover bid that includes teaming up with AOL, buying back much of the company's stock and running search ads from Google. Analysts quoted in the Journal still suggest the sale to Microsoft is a fait accompli, and that Yahoo is just trying to get CEO Steve Ballmer and company to cough up a higher bid for shares.

Word that Yahoo plans to test Google search ads has Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith and Microsoft PR all fired up. "Any definitive agreement between Yahoo! and Google would consolidate over 90 percent of the search advertising market in Google's hands," Smith said in a statement.

What's Google's App engine really mean? It means that if you're not building your Web applications in Google's favorite code, Python, you don't get any of its free goodies. It's the kind of muscle flexing Silicon Valley is used to from the old platform owner, Microsoft. Which is why none of us should be surprised that Google has declared "Google.is/Microsoft." Sort of. As Philipp Lenssen notes ".is" is the top-level domain for Iceland and "/Microsoft" is an arbitary (but hilarious) appendage to the URL. Great setup, too bad the punchline is in Icelandic. Check out Google's full admission in screenshot, below.

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang refuses to negotiate with Microsoft, but Yahoo's largest shareholders aren't so coy. Take Legg Mason portfolio manager Bill Miller's posturing in today's Wall Street Journal, for example. Miller, responsible for the second largest stake in Yahoo, today called Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's weekend ultimatum to the Yahoo board a "blunder."

Free directory assistance has a price after all: $175 million. That's the price we hear Jingle Networks is trying to get for its 1-800-FREE-411 service, which gives free business listings in exchange for playing ads. Google, Microsoft, and AT&T are all preparing bids. But a source who has looked at Jingle's numbers say it will be lucky to get full price: "It's maybe worth $90 million." By late 2006, Jingle had raised $60 million; we hear it's since blown through that, and taken on debt besides.

Seattle's only championship sports franchise, the Sonics, are headed to Oaklahoma City, much to the dismay of longtime fans now stuck rooting for the hated Portland Trailblazers, owned by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. Bilious billionaire and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, with his friends, pledged $150 million toward renovations of Seattle's coliseum and the cost of an NBA basketball team, but there was a catch. The state and the city had to come up with $75 million each for the venue upgrade.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and chairman Bill Gates have it all wrong trying to take on Google by buying Yahoo. What they really need is "an underground secret team" that works in "a new office building in Cologne" and includes " John R. Coza." Also, they need to hire "as a sort of mascot / good luck guy" bigdowro, the commenter who had this prophesy and kindly shared it with the rest of us in 443 words. It's my favorite bizzaro dreamscape since Coleridge's Kubla Khan and its pasted below.

Bernstein analyst Charles Di Bona told clients Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang's letter to Microsoft Steve Ballmer and March 18 presentation to shareholders indicate he has lost touch with reality.

According to public filings, Yahoo is planning to hold its annual shareholder meeting June 10 and file its proxy materials with the SEC by April 21. By that schedule, the Microsoft-Yahoo melodrama would necessarily come to an end on April 22. Here's the bad news: Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and the Yahoo board canceled that June 10 shareholder meeting. By law, they have until July 13 to hold it. If that date passes without a meeting, Microsoft lawyers can ask a judge to force the Yahoo board to hold one. But even then, a judge won't be able to force a meeting before another 30 days. Mark it on your calendars, people, unless Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Yang suddenly fall in love, we're in for another four months of this.

The hard sell hasn't worked, so maybe a softer appeal to the heart could woo Yahoo into Microsoft's loving embrace? Seems Steve Ballmer spent the afternoon crafting a love letter to Jerry Yang and posted it to the Missing Connections section of Craigslist.