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Even the harshest critics of Steve Ballmer will have to admit one thing: in regards to not buying Yahoo, he's been consistent for a long time now.  At a shareholder meeting today, Ballmer said that he still has no interest in a total acquisition, and Yahoo's stock has taken a nosedive of around 20.9 percent as a result.

This marks the first time Ballmer has spoken about a deal with Yahoo since Jerry Yang announced his plans to step down.  As the stock plummet proves, at least a few onlookers expected that Ballmer would find an acquisition more palatable without Yang around, and they've been sorely disappointed.

 Steve Ballmer

The development puts a few points in Yang's corner, though.  Even if Yahoo's stock rose a considerable amount after he decided to vacate the position of CEO, it's now sitting at about a 5.5-year low - well below where it was on Monday.

And, moving forward, Ballmer at least gave Yahoo fans one thing to hope for.  Even as he said, "We thought we had something that made sense.  Didn't make sense to them.  We've moved on," in regards to an acquisition, Bloomberg reports that Microsoft's CEO called the idea of a search partnership "an interesting possibility."

Microsoft's stock dropped about 6.8 percent today if anyone's keeping score, but this is mitigated by the fact that the Dow and Nasdaq lost 5.1 percent and 6.5 percent, respectively.