Yahoo Corp. is up for sale

Last night, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz announced in a company-wide e-mail that she had been fired by the chairman of the board of directors, which was quickly followed by rumours that Yahoo! would be willing to sell the company if the price was right.

Now, Yahoo! has a longstanding history in mobile; once upon a time, they were quite cozy with both ATT and T-Mobile, and even now, they are still active with Japanese service provider SoftBank. Yahoo! has also pushed some pretty compelling apps, likeLivestand, IntoNow, and Sketch-a-Search. Even on the developer side, Yahoo! has this cool service called Fire Eagle that shares location data across multiple apps that use the same API.

The obvious choice for an acquirer is Microsoft Microsoft already tried purchasing Yahoo! back in 2008 for $44.6 billion, and they still have a partnership in place so Bing powers Yahoo! search. Windows Live services could easily absorb various Yahoo! counterparts.  So, there us already plenty of history between those two giants, but maybe Google would be interested in swooping in, if only to maintain the significant lead they still enjoy over Microsoft web efforts. A move from Google is a bit less likely, since they have actually been busy shutting down projects rather than starting new ones.