Yahoo remained coy on Monday as Microsoft publicly touted the virtues of its US$44.6-billion bid to take over the Internet firm and Google maneuvered behind the scenes to thwart it.
"The Yahoo board is undertaking a deliberate review process," the Sunnyvale, California, company said on its Web site.
"This will include evaluating all of the company's strategic alternatives -- including maintaining Yahoo as an independent company. A review process like this is fluid, and it can take quite a bit of time," the company said.
Yahoo is a "complex company" with promising stakes in search engine Alibaba in China and Yahoo Japan that would have to be valued into an acquisition price, financial analysts said.
Yahoo boasts more than 500 million users worldwide and launched a new advertising platform last year.
Microsoft urged Yahoo to accept the offer it announced on Friday, adding it hopes to get a quick response.
"We think it's a generous one," Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said on Monday at the US firm's annual conference with analysts in New York.
The offer represents a tempting 62 percent premium on Yahoo's closing share price last Thursday.
"We trust the Yahoo board and the Yahoo shareholders will join with us quickly in deciding to move down an integrated path," Ballmer said.
Google on Sunday slammed Microsoft's effort as an attack on the independence of the Internet.
"Microsoft's hostile bid for Yahoo raises troubling questions," said David Drummond, Google's senior vice president for corporate development and chief legal officer.
"This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It's about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation," he said.
By Monday, unconfirmed reports surfaced that Google's chief executive had called Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang (楊致遠) to offer to help the company resist any hostile takeover campaign by Microsoft.
Yahoo would not confirm whether Google chief executive Eric Schmidt has contacted Yang.
Yahoo has received calls from "a number of interested parties" and has a wide range of strategic options, a source close to Yahoo said.
Those options could include outsourcing online advertising to arch-rival Google, a proven master at pumping revenues from that well.
If it spurns Microsoft's offer, Yahoo's board of directors will be under pressure to give stockholders a soothing cash payout or even borrow money to buy back shares and turn the firm private.
Going private might be even more painful for Yahoo's 14,300 employees than a sale to Microsoft.
To help repay the more than US$20 billion debt that would be incurred in a leveraged buyout, Yahoo would likely have to fire about 4,500 employees, or 31 percent of its work force, Stifel Nicolaus analyst George Askew estimated on Monday.
Yahoo also probably would have to sell about US$12.5 billion worth of investments in several promising Internet companies.
Like most analysts, Askew still believes Yahoo will wind up in Microsoft's clutches because the world's largest software maker appears to be a determined bidder with more financial firepower than just about every other conceivable suitor.
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