Yahoo Inc today blamed Microsoft chief executive Steven A Ballmer for its failed bid to acquire Yahoo Inc and said the internet search major remained open to a deal with Microsoft.

Yahoo Inc.'s chief executive Jerry Yang  blamed Ballmer and his aides for walking away from the bid even as the Microsoft CEO said Yang refused to accept less than $37 a share - a $5-billion bump in the purchase price of Yahoo!

"They chose to walk away after we put a price on the table, and they didn't want to negotiate," Yang said in an interview published in The New York Times.

Yang said he was willing to negotiate the $33 a share offer for Yahoo but Microsoft pulled out after talk turned to raising the price.

Microsoft, which had offered to buy Yahoo for $31 a share, valuing it around $44.6 billion in February, had last week raised it to $33 a share, valuing it around $50 billion.

Yang, however, feels Yahoo is worth more than that.

"From my perspective, we were open all along to selling to Microsoft. We just feel Yahoo, either stand-alone or with Microsoft, is worth more than what they put on the table," Yang told NYT.

Microsoft's advisers and executives say Yahoo never seemed interested in a takeover offer as they received no counter offer from Yahoo for three months, after Microsoft's deadline for the earlier deal expired.

Yang and his board sticked to a price of $37 a share and ultimately refused to budge despite Microsoft raising its offer from $31 To $33 a share when Yang and Yahoo co-founder David Filo met with Ballmer and other Microsoft executives at the Seattle Airport last week-end.

Yang, however denied Yahoo was deliberately sticking to a price to thwart the Microsoft bid.  'We did not say it was a take-it-or-leave-it number in the sense that we would never negotiate any more,' Yang told the Financial Times.

Yang is likely to face shareholders' wrath, putting tremendous pressure on the Yahoo to go for a major makeover or go crawling back to Microsoft. Yahoo's  annual general meeting is due on July 3.

Microsoft, which has vowed a proxy war on yahoo, may now try to oust the 10 members of Yahoo's board of directors who are up for re-election.

Yahoo's stock price dived 15 per cent on Monday as the internet giant's future became clouded after Microsoft walked away from a bid rather than pursue a hostile takeover.