All Things Digital

Is Microsoft about to make another move on Yahoo? Or perhaps on AOL? Or is it just getting ready to articulate strategic plans for getting serious about the online search business on its own at its financial analysts’ tomorrow morning?

Or perhaps–and this might be the best strategy for the moment–the software giant is actually managing to stifle itself and wait to return to the playing field when things settle down a little bit.

One thing is clear: Microsoft (MSFT) has got to be plenty irked that its efforts have been vexed once again, this time by by the proxy fight settlement its one-time takeover quarry, Yahoo (YHOO), made earlier this week with activist investor Carl Icahn.

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Listening to all the birds-on-a-wire chatter about what will happen in the latest round of the never-ending Microsoft-Yahoo saga, it’s still hard to know what to think, given the ever-increasing noise around the proceedings, which will continue until Yahoo’s Aug. 1 shareholder meeting.

Yesterday, it got louder still as Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock and CEO Jerry Yang sent out far and wide yet another stinkbomb letter, calling activist investor Carl Icahn a money-grubbing “corporate agitator.”

Well, yes–not that there’s anything wrong with that!

Unless you are shocked, shocked, that gambling is going on here, as Yahoo (YHOO) apparently is (not really, but it makes for a good story).

But not content to stop there, Yahoo spun a tale of what BoomTown can only describe as a sitcom paranoid fantasy about Microsoft (MSFT).

Essentially accusing Microsoft of trying to grab Yahoo on the cheap, Yahoo mocked its odd-couple “alliance” with Icahn.

“Microsoft’s flip-flops and inconsistencies over the past five months are so stupefying that one can only conclude that Microsoft was never fully committed to acquiring Yahoo,” they wrote.

Doubtless, today or tomorrow will bring a fresh retort from Icahn or Microsoft, full of the same not-so-sweet nothings (and by nothings, I mean nothing).

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