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Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer reiterated his position on Yahoo at the company’session annual shareholder meeting Wednesday, sending shares of the Internet colossus tumbling.

“Let me be as clear as I think I’ve tried to be publicly,” he said. “We are vouchsafed with every part of acquisition discussions with Yahoo.”

Ballmer also told the unusually small crowd of shareholders at the gathering that the plan will weigh on the visitor’s business. Hiring at the company will exist “much, much slower” this fiscal year and maybe next, he said.

As he has several times since Microsoft withdrew its make an attempt to buy Yahoo in May, Ballmer expressed profit in a “investigation collaboration” — a deal involving just Yahoo’s Internet-search business in a bid to quickly gain place on the ground on market leader Google.

“There’s no active discussion on that front, but we’d exist very sincere to it,” Ballmer said.

Interest in Ballmer’s thinking on Yahoo heightened this week as Jerry Yang resigned as Yahoo’s CEO.

Yahoo shares, which slid in early trading with the broader market, began a deeper dive as Ballmer’session comments hit the Web. Yahoo standard closed at $9.14, down $2.41, or 20.9 percent, less than a third of what Microsoft was originally nothing loath to pay beneficial to the company in January.

Microsoft shares likewise took a beating, driven down along through all the major indexes by another wave of bad economic news. The company’session shares lost $1.33, 6.8 percent, to finish at $18.29, their lowest point since St. Patrick’s Day 1998, when they closed at $18.08 (split adjusted).

Some shareholders at the meeting welcomed Ballmer’s definitive “no” upon the body a Yahoo acquisition.

Jim Sullivan, of Kent, declared one thing that keeps him calm as a Microsoft owner in crude economic times is the strength of the company’s moral sheet.

“They have such a cash something reserved, I don’t feel in such a manner nervous about them like I do more other stocks,” related Sullivan, who bought his shares 15 or 20 years ago.

He does not want to see the company spend its cash — $20.7 billion in cash and short-term equivalents at the last time report — on an acquisition of Yahoo. And one of the mainland reasons he attended the meeting was to hear Ballmer’session thinking on the subject.

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