Dear Jerry:

After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.

I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!’s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal. I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter. I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible.

I am disappointed that Yahoo! has not moved towards accepting our offer. We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the leading search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons.

First, it would fundamentally impair Yahoo!’s own strategy and long-term development capability by encouraging advertisers to use Google as opposed to your Panama paid search system. This would also break up your search advertising and display advertising strategies and the ecosystem surrounding them. This would impair the reliance on your display advertising business to fuel future growth.

Given this, it would impair Yahoo’s ability to retain the talented engineers working on advertising systems that are important to our interest in a combination of our companies.

Accordingly, your apparent plan to pursue such an arrangement in the event of a proxy contest or exchange offer leads me to the firm decision not to pursue such a path. Instead, I hereby formally withdraw Microsoft’s proposal to acquire Yahoo!.

We will move forward and will continue to innovate and grow our business at Microsoft with the talented team we have in place and potentially through strategic transactions with other business partners.

I still believe even today that our offer remains the only alternative put forward that provides your stockholders full and fair value for their shares. By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table.

But clearly a deal is not to be.

Thank you again for the time we have spent together discussing this.

Sincerely yours,

Steven A. Ballmer

1.　What's the purpose of Mr. Ballmer to write this letter?
A.  To say 'Thank you ' to Jerry and his management team for the time and attention they gave him.
B. To express his disappointment after Yahoo! refused Microsoft's offer.
C. To tell Jerry how things have been going on in the past three months
D. To inform Yahoo! of Microsoft's final decision on the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.
2. What decision have Mr Ballmer and his men made?
A. to combine Microsoft and Yahoo! as soon as possible.
B. not to combine Microsoft and Yahoo! now.
C. to convey the thanks to Yahoo!’s Board of Directors.
D. Not mensioned in the passage.
3. According to the writer, ________ .
A.  The discussions this week are particularly fruitful.
B. He blamed the failure of the combination on Yahoo!'s response to the propposal.
C. Microsoft actually prefers to acquire Google rather than Yahoo!.
D. After the discussions Jerry and his stockholders forgot to take something valuable on the table.
4. The underlined word "outsourcing" probably means ________ .
A. the practice that a company pays to have part of its work done by another company.
B. the result that a company has used up all its sourses in a short period.
C. a company that provides its services out of the company itself, for example, in the open air.
D. the relation between inside and outside a company.