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.

I would like to announce quite categorically that Computing has no plans to buy Yahoo.

Despite speculation around the office that our team might invest our beer fund and chip in a few quid each, I can now confirm we will not be making a bid for the internet firm. Microsoft, you can rest easy. We'll save that battle for another day.

I just wanted to make sure that readers are clear on our position, because over the next few days and weeks there will hardly be a large internet or media company that is not going to be linked - idly or otherwise - to some sort of purchase or alliance with Yahoo, now that the company is "in play" following Microsoft's $44.6bn hostile takeover bid.

Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation, one of the world's biggest media companies and already owner of MySpace, said today: "We are definitely not going to make a bid for Yahoo." Join the club, Rupert.

But in Murdoch's case, his denial generated pages and pages of web and print copy around the globe leaving observers with a lingering memory that News Corporation was involved in the Yahoo deal somewhere, so it must be a major player in the internet world.  No doubt the likes of Disney and perhaps AT&T will similarly enter the fray in a very non-committal sort of way at some point too.

So will any media giants step in as a white knight for the beleaguered Yahoo? Well, if they need any sort of debt to finance it, and have to approach Wall Street for advice, try avoiding the mention of AOL Time Warner, the last great internet/media deal and perhaps one of the least successful corporate mergers of all time.

Then there is the credit crunch. There is little appetite for a heavily debt-financed acquisition in the financial markets, and although Microsoft has now said it may use a portion of debt to finance its bid, the software giant is so phenomenally cash rich that few companies are able to match the price offered for Yahoo.

Don't rule out Yahoo looking for minority investors - a determined 20 per cent shareholder could be enough to complicate Microsoft's plans - and the search firm will certainly be looking to shore up its future with alliances and partnerships with anybody who has a vested interest in stopping Microsoft - primarily Google of course.

But Microsoft has achieved phase one of its plan. Everyone wants to be linked to buying Yahoo - thus furthering the expectation of a deal - but few can compete with Redmond's cash pile.

The rumours have finally abated, and what was perhaps the raging inevitability of a Microsoft bid for Yahoo is now a reality.

The software giant today offered nearly $45bn for its internet rival. It also emerged that Yahoo rejected an acquisition approach from Microsoft in February last year, believing that its 2007 turnaround plans and the development of its Project Panama search advertising platform would be the basis for the company’s revival.

But when Yahoo announced earlier this week that annual profit was down 12 per cent, Microsoft decided to strike.

Last year, Yahoo was able to convince shareholders that it had a plan in place to deliver the necessary improvement on its stock price. Just 12 months later, those shareholders may be harder to convince when faced with cashing in on a 62 per cent premium on the current share value for Yahoo.

So, chances are the shareholders will say yes. Certainly it would take a very long-term investor to think they are willing to wait for Yahoo shares to increase 62 per cent.

Then it will come down to the regulators. US and European competition authorities will undoubtedly want to examine the deal.

In the US, Google’s planned acquisition of online advertising firm DoubleClick was closely examined by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), before approving the deal in December last year. Microsoft will be heartened by that decision and will expect it to be seen as something of a precedent.

In Europe, the EU Competition Commission has a long and combative relationship with Microsoft over its dominant position in PC software. The commission has also taken a long, hard look at the DoubleClick acquisition, and many experts expect it to follow the FTC’s example.

So, as Microsoft will undoubtedly argue, if a merger between the world’s biggest pay-per-click internet advertiser and the one of the world’s leading online display advertising firms is acceptable, why would there be a problem with the number two and three search engines getting together?

All Microsoft’s official communications about the Yahoo proposal refer to a “dominant” online search advertising firm. Redmond will argue that combining with its rival will increase competition in the market by offering customers an alternative to Google that can match it more closely in user base and market share.

Google, however, is probably already telling regulators that in a market dominated by three companies, taking one of those out is to the detriment of competition. Remember that opposition to the DoubleClick deal in Europe was led by a Microsoft complaint to the EU. Google will seriously consider returning the compliment.

Microsoft will have a battle on its hands to see the acquisition through, but the deal makes sense all round.

So the fight for the online advertising dollar is well and truly underway. Internet ad spend last year was estimated at $40bn – forecasts suggest it will double to $80bn in 2010. Microsoft wants a bigger share of the pie, and the combination with Yahoo is the obvious way to achieve it.

The question marks that remain will be about how well two companies with very different development cultures can integrate. Yahoo and Microsoft have both been left in the lurch at times by the speed of new web trends and technologies – the success of Google Maps, for example. Will more programmers and more research and development cash be enough to close that innovation gap? It’s a hard task, but don’t bet against it.

But the acid test will be what you do – you, the internet user.

If you use Yahoo because you hate Microsoft, will you be driven into the arms of Google? Yahoo has a huge and loyal user base, every single one of whom is just a click away from becoming a Google customer instead.

When Ford bought Volvo, for example, Volvo drivers were unlikely to sell their cars in protest. But loyalty on the internet is a far more ephemeral thing.

We can expect to see Microsoft vs Google as the head-to-head for the internet era. But the winner will not be decided by advertisers, regulators or developers. It will be decided by you.

There are millions of voices making claims one way or the other about Vista, Microsoft's new version of Windows, released to consumers worldwide today.

I don't plan to add to them, only to mention a little irony that someone pointed out to me earlier.

On the same day as Vista and Office 2007 hit the shops, UK retailer PC World announced that it will no longer stock floppy disks. Take a look at the toolbar in your favourite Microsoft applications - Word, Powerpoint, Excel etc - and what do you see as the icon for the 'save' function? A floppy disk.

Does anyone know what the latest version of the Office products uses as the 'save' icon? I'd be interested to find out...