Tired of taking it on the chin from bully activist investors, Yahoo! executives are counting the reasons why they're better off forging a advertising partnership Google rather than selling the company's search business to Microsoft. In a letter to shareholders CEO Jerry Yang and chairman Roy Bostock said the Microsoft plan "would also have given Microsoft veto rights" on such things as a future sale of Yahoo. As a result, the pact it signed with Google earlier this month is much more attractive than anything it could have gotten from Redmond.