Relegation-threatened Fulham Football Club, currently second bottom of the Premier League, have come up with a survival plan. They want to buy Derby County.

OK, of course they don’t. But if the latest rumours about Yahoo are true, then maybe this is the sort of business precedent we can expect.

According to reports, Yahoo is considering a bid for AOL now that Time Warner has apparently decided to sell of much of the business that it was once acquired by for $164bn at the height of turn-of-the-century dot com madness.

So, to repel an unwanted takeover bid by Microsoft, ailing Yahoo decides to buy sickly AOL. If I was a Yahoo shareholder, I wouldn’t be inspired with confidence that this is the strategic plan to restore my stock valuation.

Let’s not forget, Yahoo has delivered eight straight quarters of disappointing financial results. It has lost share in online advertising when the rest of the market grew by about 25 per cent – and Google by even more. And the search firm’s stock price fell 40 per cent in the three months before Microsoft’s offer was announced.

As a shareholder, you’d need some convincing that this was a business going places, regardless of how big its customer base or how innovative its product development.

It is no surprise that Yahoo has rejected Microsoft’s first bid – surely only us Brits accept the first price we are offered in a haggling contest. And investors clearly expect a higher offer, since Yahoo’s share price last week reached the value of Microsoft’s $31-per-share proposal. Yahoo’s newly-inflated stock value reflects only the expectation of a quick profit when Microsoft ups its bid. If Microsoft played the ultimate hardball and withdrew its offer completely, watch the Yahoo share price plummet.

"It's good negotiating tactics to try to get a higher price from Microsoft," Laura Martin from Soleil Securities Group told the San Jose Mercury News. "But if they really reject the offer they are going to have a litany of shareholder lawsuits. It's clear there are no other bidders for anything close to this price."

As far as profit-seeking Yahoo shareholders go, Microsoft’s bid is the only game in town. Buy AOL instead, and they simply wait another year or two before YahAOL goes the same way.