You have to know I've been waiting all week to use that title.

It looks like Yahoo has declined the first pass of Microsoft's buy out offer today, or so reports the Wall Street Journal, citing anonymous sources familiar with the search engine company's board meetings on the matter last week. That's hardly the end of the dance; Todd Bishop at the Seattle PI has a nice rundown on Microsoft's options at this point should it prove serious about the acquisition.

So it's still entirely possible that the two companies will merge, but the longer the buyout takes to conclude and the more aggressive that Redmond has to be to conclude it, the worse the company will suffer in its shadow-boxing match with Google (which seems determined to fight it at every turn; one particularly Machiavellian scenario I favor is that Microsoft's bid is a feint designed primarily to send Google screaming toward Yahoo with fistfuls of cash in an effort to acquire the company first, a move which would be almost as disastrous for them as it would for Microsoft). Bad enough that Ballmer was forced to go shopping outside the company for some way to top Google; to be spurned now on top of coming off as weak in making the offer initially comes across that much worse. The degree of desperation with which Redmond pursues the deal will offer further clues on how incapable it really is of taking on Google on Google's own turf.