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As Microsoft weighs its acquisition options with Yahoo, it’s interesting that its board is pretty much leaving the decision to CEO Steve Ballmer. Could it be that Ballmer’s next move be the one that decides his future at Microsoft?

Ballmer really doesn’t face an easy option when it comes to his company’s takeover bid with Yahoo. There’s not a "no brainer" decision that he can opt for, and walk away with everyone smiling. Consider his choices:

1. Offer more for Yahoo. Microsoft has indicated it might increase its bid to $33 a share, but that’s still off from the $35-37 number that Yahoo (and its shareholders) appear to want. Offering more would bring a swift conclusion to the protracted negotiations, but down the road he might find stakeholders questioning whether he overpaid or not.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was honored as Media Person of the Year at this year’s Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. As he addressed the festival, however, he pulled a bit of a Calacanis (you guys do remember when Calacanis called SEO “bull@#&%” in an SES keynote, right?). Ballmer told the assembled media and advertising gurus that, basically, we can kiss the good old days of rolling in dough goodbye.

Among other tales of doom and gloom, as reported by the Guardian:

• “I don’t think we are in a recession, I think we have reset. A recession implies recovery [to pre-recession levels] and for planning purposes I don’t think we will. We have reset and won’t rebound and re-grow.”

It appears Jerry Yang’s appeal for Microsoft to buy Yahoo is falling on deaf ears. According to AP, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is just not interested anymore:

"We made an offer, we made another offer, and it was clear that Yahoo didn’t want to sell the business to us and we moved on," Ballmer said. "We are not interested in going back and re-looking at an acquisition. I don’t know why they would be either, frankly. They turned us down at $33 a share."

I can’t say I blame him. He did leave the door open for a partnership deal–likely similar to that he proposed before Google stepped in–saying:

"I’m sure there are still some opportunities for some kind of partnership around search, but I think acquisition is a thing of the past"

We’ve got out hands on the full memo from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to the company’s employees.

The full text is below, but I want to highlight some of the tough measure Microsoft is putting in place in order to reduce expenses:

To increase efficiency, we’re taking a series of aggressive steps. We’ll cut travel expenditures 20 percent and make significant reductions in spending on vendors and contingent staff. We’ve scaled back Puget Sound campus expansion and reduced marketing budgets. We’ll also reduce costs by eliminating merit increases for FY10 that would have taken effect in September of this calendar year.

I’m sure folks are glad to still have a job, but it looks like salaries will be frozen for the time being.

The full memo:

It’s always nice to see Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer actually sitting on a chair, as opposed to throwing one.

In this video, he chats with TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington about a host of Microsoft initiatives. Mid-way through, he discusses search…

…the UI, the approach, the algorithms have changed less in the last five years, then more … so I think if you look out the next 10 years we’re going to see more innovation in search. And, of course, that’ll be best served by good competition in the market and, y’know, at this stage, hopefully with the government approval of our deal with Yahoo, the good competition better come from us. Otherwise I don’t think we’ll see some of that innovation.