Sorry, Jerry, a buyout’s not gonna happen. That’s the message MSFT CEO Steve Ballmer made clear at a business luncheon in Sydney, Reuters says.

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“We made an offer, we made another offer ... We moved on,“Ballmer said. “We tried at one point to do a partnership around search ... and that didn’t work either, and we moved on and they moved on. We are not interested in going back and re-looking at an acquisition. I don’t know why they would be either, frankly.”

But he did leave the door open for a potential search deal, something some analysts say Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) will have to consider if it wants to stay alive despite the demise of its search partnership with Google (NSDQ: GOOG). Ballmer’s definitive statement came after Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang suggested that MSFT buy Yahoo during the Web 2.0 conference yesterday.

Check out mocoNews for the search deal with Verizon that MSFT is trying to snatch from Google.

Photo Credit: DBegley