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As it scrambles to avoid defeat in its battle with Microsoft, Yahoo may try to put a little more time on the clock.

Microsoft, whose offer for Yahoo is now worth $41.2 billion, was preparing to escalate its takeover fight by starting a proxy contest next week. But in an effort to delay that move, Yahoo is considering several options, including a plan to postpone its annual meeting, people close to the company said on Tuesday.

The maneuver comes as Yahoo has stepped up merger and joint venture talks with AOL, a unit of Time Warner, these people said.

Microsoft had been preparing to nominate a slate of directors to the board of Yahoo by next Thursday, the deadline for mounting a proxy contest. If Yahoo moves back that deadline back or postpones its meeting, something it could announce as early as this week, the company could buy time to seek out and evaluating alternatives.
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What investors want to know about Microsoft and Yahoo these days is this: Are they, or aren’t they? Talking to each other about Microsoft’s $40 billion-plus takeover offer, that is.

Don’t expect enlightenment from the chatty executive ranks at Microsoft, who have made public statements galore even though, sadly for newshounds, their accounts of talks (or nontalks) appear to conflict.

CEO Steve Ballmer, a man who should know, said of the deal at a German technology conference, “There’s been a range of dialogue and there’s a range of alternatives being considered.” Then, after that shocker, he demurred, “I think it’s best for me not to get into the detail.”

Last Friday, Jean-Philippe Courtois, who heads the company’s international operations, said to an Agence France Press reporter that Microsoft and Yahoo are having “a very close dialogue.”
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Traditionally, the big names of the IT industry make their predictions the day before CeBIT opens. This time, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer was one of them and predicted ground breaking changes for the future.

While Bill Gates was considered the chief visionary among the Microsoft leadership, it seems that Steve Ballmer has taken on this role now. In his opening speech at CeBIT, he did not touch on any of the problems currently dogging the software giant, such as its intended takeover of Yahoo or the multi-million Euro fine imposed by the EU Commision. Instead, he gazed into his own personal crystal ball and shared what he saw with the crowd. His favourite word? Computing revolution. “In my 28 years at Microsoft, I’ve lived through four computing revolutions.” In his opinion, the first was when computers became affordable for a wide audience, the second was the development of the graphics user interface, the third the rise of the internet, with the fourth being the interactive Web 2.0.

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This week, NASA unveiled a new website that touts spin-offs from its technology that have found uses in the bathroom, kitchen, grocery store, and other places. You can find the website by following this link and clicking on “NASA Home and City” in the menu.

Some previous bragging about NASA spin-offs has raised eyebrows, even within the agency itself. Agency staffers questioned earlier boasts about a variety of smoke detector technology that NASA was said to have had a hand in developing.

I had a look at the spin-off website, and although some of the claims are surprising, each is accompanied by a link to further information to back it up.

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If you want to understand Microsoft’s motivation for buying Yahoo, look at the price cuts announced today for Windows Vista. (Stay with me on this.)

The price cuts for boxed copies of Vista are especially big in developing countries, where users will be able to buy full versions of the operating system for the price they would have paid for an upgrade. (The better to prevent piracy, Microsoft says.)

In the United States, the main difference will be with the Premium edition (now $129 instead of $159) and the Ultimate ($219, down from $299).

Microsoft says the cuts are meant to lift sales in retail stores, a small segment of the Windows market. The vast majority of operating systems, of course, are sold bundled with computers.
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