So what’s in store for Yahoo? New CEO Carol Bartz will be announcing the company’s first quarter results tomorrow, and all signs point towards the numbers being less than spectacular. What’s a CEO to do? Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster appears to have some suggestions: Why not buy Gawker? How about the New York Times? Says Jaffray’s in ‘An Open Letter To Carol Bartz:’

Acquire a major print new company with global scale and stature in addition to a blog network experienced in creating short content to generate significant page views. In particular, he says that the New York Times and Gawker Media would fit this profile. “These content acquisitions would allow Yahoo to own and distribute a collection of the best content on the Web in addition to generating short-form content to maximize page views and stickiness.”

Crazy? We’ve actually speculated on a number of our podcasts whether it would be smarter for MSM companies to purchase established blogs rather than attempt to start their own from scratch (we’re not the first to do so, by the way). But a Yahoo-owned Gawker? We asked Gawker-head Nick Denton what he thought of the suggestion.

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Looks like at least one chapter of the long Yahoo soap opera has drawn to a close. Jerry Yang, who co-founded Yahoo back in 1995 announced yesterday that he was stepping down from his position as CEO. The move comes after many, many months of wrangling, proxy battling, and failed takeover and merger attempts — most notably Yang turned down a unsolicited offer of $31 a share in cash and stock from Microsoft — and more recently a failed move to strike a search-advertising partnership with Google.

Yang took over as CEO in June of 2007 amidst “high hopes” but quickly became the object of shareholder frustration and criticism after turning down the Microsoft offer amidst plummeting stock shares. Proxy battler Carl Icahn had promised to replace Yang if he was successful in his bid this past spring, but in the end the two managed to strike a truce, which kept Yang in is position. That said, apparently Yang has been considering stepping down for months. Wired says Yang is “out of the company he cofounded looking anything but a visionary, but instead as yet another high tech entrepreneur…who didn’t realized that time had passed him by.” On the upside Yang’s return to a figurehead position (Chief Yahoo) may pave the way for another deal with Microsoft. As for who might fill Yang’s shoes?

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Looks like the rest of the world isn’t so thrilled at Google’s “ever-tightening grip on internet traffic” and “its unbridled use of online content.” Especially when it comes to the proposed Google-Yahoo ad deal. The Times Bits blog is reporting that the World Association of Newspapers posted a note on its website calling the partnership “anti-competitive and urging regulators to block the deal.”

Perhaps never in the history of newspaper publishing has a single, commercial entity threatened to exert this much control over the destiny of the press…It is particularly worrisome that this consolidation of power is occurring at the same time that Google increasingly takes positions that are adverse to newspapers and other content creators.

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Rumors have been swirling since last week’s Yahoo shareholder’s meeting that the voting results from the August 1 election of its board of directors did not quite add up (suspicion arose when Yahoo head Jerry Yang‘s numbers were higher than last year’s). Turns out where there’s smoke there’s fire.

Yahoo has announced that the company it hired to do the counting made a mistake, seems Yang and three other board members including Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock, director Ron Burkle and Arthur Kern are significantly less poplular than they’d been led to believe. In fact 33% of the members withheld their vote for Yang out of protest (this is more than double what was originally reported). No word yet on how the mistake was made.

This is no fun at all. After months of stirring up trouble and headlines (and blog posts) proxy battler Carl Icahn will not be attending the Yahoo‘s long anticipated annual shareholders meeting today. Per Icahn’s blog:

I will not be attending. The proxy fight is over and it will not do shareholders or Yahoo any good to have the annual meeting turn into a media event for no purpose.

Ha! As if media events need a purpose, this is an election year after all. Ichan goes on to say that the reason he’s been on the DL these past two weeks is because he saw the writing on the wall and decided there was “no point in spending the final two weeks in a debilitating fight.”

Anyway, the end result is that Yahoo head Jerry Yang will be flying solo today when he faces shareholders, though with Icahn’s absence and a zero deal with Microsoft the mood feels a tiny bit more conciliatory than it did a few months ago, and certainly (sadly for us, we admit) will result in less fireworks. That’s not to say Yahoo doesn’t face a uphill battle, stock prices plunged after Yang turned down the Microsoft deal back in May, and have yet to recover.

Alas. It looks like maybe, finally, Microsoft has thrown in the Yahoo towel. The last straw in the months long we-love-you, we-love-you-not dealings may have been this week’s announcement that proxy-battler Carl Icahn had apparently jumped ship and made amends with Yahoo head Jerry Yang, accepting three board seats in the process. This following a Icahn, Microsoft offer that Yahoo termed “stupid.” Yesterday, chief financial officer Chris Liddell told a group of Microsoft investors that the chance of deal was “so small as to be essentially negligible,” and Microsoft head followed up saying that he hoped Liddell’s comments “had removed any ‘specter’ of uncertainty.”

So what’s the next step for Microsoft? Well they have just announced a deal to bring “its Web search and search ads to social-networking site Facebook Inc.” After all this, we imagine they will need as many friends as they can get.

In recent weeks most of the talk about the operatic ins and outs of the Yahoo and Microsoft relationship have centered around what proxy battler Carl Icahn and Microsoft head Steve Ballmer have been up to, and the different ways Yahoo is finding to escape their evil clutches. But the August 1 shareholder deadline is fast approaching and that led us to wonder: wherefore Jerry Yang?

Well (via Radar) we found our answer. He’s writing a book! Kidding, he’s merely penning long memos detailing why Icahn is a carpet-bagging, n’er do well “corporate agitator!” who has involved himself in a marriage of convenience with Microsoft.

The recently-formed Carl Icahn-Microsoft alliance continues to make misleading statements about their plans for Yahoo. Your Board of Directors believes strongly that the Icahn-Microsoft agenda…will destroy stockholder value at Yahoo, serving only their very narrow special interests, clearly not your interests.

That said, Yang is willing to deal, at $33 a share as long as it provides “real value to our stockholders.” Also, and we imagine he’s going to be stressing this point in the coming weeks since it was the basis for Icahn’s involvement in the first place, he want shareholders to know “your Board takes seriously its obligation to examine all value-creating steps it could take and continues to actively examine many of these now.” Read the whole shebang here.

If only we could all take our bad relationship complaints directly to a congressional hearing. At an anti-trust hearing yesterday an exec for Microsoft — whose recent proposal to Yahoo was thrown back in their face — “painted an alarmist portrait” of Yahoo’s outsourcing deal with Google saying if the deal went through Google would essentially control 90% of online ad marketing, making any sort of competition impossible. What this exec neglected to mention is that if the Yahoo/Google deal somehow falls apart, due to Congressional interference or other stuff, Yahoo would be weakened and further susceptible to a bid from, you guessed it, Microsoft! (as if we all haven’t tried similar post-break-up tactics).

One of the judges wanted to know how a Microsoft/Yahoo deal would be less threatening to the American consumer than a Google one and another wondered whether a Google deal would just result in Yahoo being the “newest satellite in the Google orbit.” However, in the end lawmakers “refrained from passing judgement” yesterday. Yahoo’s shareholder meeting is set for August 1.

It’s back off-again. Over the week-end Yahoo rejected Carl Icahn and Microsoft‘s “take it or leave it” proposal, which required Yahoo to sell its search business to Microsoft, throw out its board and management, and hand control of the rest of the company to Carl Icahn. Not surprisingly even the analysts and shareholders who had previously criticized Yahoo for letting takeover talks with Microsoft collapse earlier this year referred to the “stupid” offer as a stunt. But don’t despair, all is not lost! Yahoo chairman/CEO Roy Bostock says the company is more than happy to consider a sale and has “emphatically” told Ballmer that Yahoo would be “willing to sell to Microsoft at $33 a share or to negotiate a search deal after the proxy fight.”

Meanwhile over at AdAge Simon Dumenco says the whole “on-again, off-again, full-frontal, roundabout, all-or-nothing, piecemeal” relationship is bad for Microsoft’s image and that this entire deal (or non-deal) is evidence that Microsoft head Steve Ballmer is running “amok” now that Bill Gates has effectively left the building. But that doesn’t mean we want all this “pouncing and striking” and “ducking and weaving” to end! Oh no, we have to agree with Dumenco that as far as media “dramedies” go it’s too much fun. The only thing missing now is some Rupe.

We’re running out of relationship metaphors to describe the on-again, off-again business dealings between Yahoo, Microsoft and more recently, Carl Icahn. As it stands the trio appears to be somewhere between Three’s Company and Melrose Place.

Over the week-end reports surfaced that Icahn, who is currently waging a proxy battle against Yahoo’s board, had convinced Microsoft to publicly renew its interest in Yahoo’s search business as long as Yahoo replaces its board. The question now, according to the New York Post, is whether Icahn can convince the Yahoo board to trust him to make the deal happen and sell the company at a premium, something Yahoo head Jerry Yang was unable or unwilling to do. This renewed interest on the party of Microsoft is apparently the result of a number of conversations Icahn had last week with Microsoft head Steven Ballmer and may signal Microsoft’s “acknowledgment that it badly needs Yahoo to compete with Google in Web advertising.” For their part Yahoo seemed less confident in Microsoft’s committment saying

If Microsoft and Mr. Ballmer really want to purchase Yahoo, we again invite them to make a proposal immediately…And if Mr. Icahn has an actual plan for Yahoo beyond hoping that Microsoft might actually consummate a deal which they have repeatedly walked away from, we would be very interested in hearing it.

Yep! As with all great love stories, it ain’t over until the consumation is confirmed. Stay tuned.