• Financial Times, Friday, June 20, 2008 11:30 AM

Microsoft will not attempt to make up for its failed move for Yahoo through a slew of acquisitions, CEO Steve Ballmer reiterated Thursday. Following the breakdown in talks with Yahoo, social networking giant Facebook and Time Warner's troubled portal, AOL were identified as potential acquisition targets for the software giant.

"People don't understand what they're talking about," Ballmer said in an interview with the Financial Times. "At the end of the day, this is about the ad platform," he added, and not some "plan B." Kevin Johnson, who heads Microsoft's Windows and internet businesses, said the move for Yahoo was purely an advertising play, with search being by far the most important component.

"The most important application for the foreseeable future ... is search," Ballmer said. "I don't think we can say: 'OK, well, we're going to be in the ad platform business and we're going to do it just on the strength of non-search-based assets.' We don't have to dominate, but we'd better have a darn good chunk of the search market over time."

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