Throwing cold water on Time Warner's ongoing attempts to consider a partnership with Yahoo, the Internet giant's CEO Carol Bartz said that the struggling company was still in a position to "take on" rivals Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc!

Discussions about a prospective AOL-Yahoo partnership, which were initiated last year, have not made much headway of late. The companies have gone their own way, with Yahoo hiring Bartz and Time Warner announcing the spin off its internet business.

Dismissing the idea of any kind of a deal with AOL, Bartz said in an interview on FOX Business Network: "Yahoo-AOL would not happen anytime in the forever future. Yahoo is a much stronger property in a different direction and there's no sense confusing all of that."

In an attempt to attune her position with regard to her last week statement that Yahoo would be "cleaner and simpler" without having to do anything with Microsoft, Bartz, however, did not rule out the idea of a Yahoo-Microsoft deal. The Yahoo CEO said during the interview that Yahoo could strike a partnership with "somebody," for search in general.

Bartz comment about Microsoft, which came at an investor conference last week, had sent the shares of Yahoo - the second-ranking US search engine with 20.4 percent market share in April, following top-ranking Google's 64.2 percent - plunging 5 percent.