Oct. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Yahoo! Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jerry Yang may not be tough enough to pull the company out of its slump, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said.

Yang should have taken Microsoft Corp.'s offer to buy the company for as much as $47.5 billion, Cuban said in an interview yesterday with Bloomberg TV. A more aggressive stance against competitor Google Inc. could have preserved jobs at Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo, Cuban said.

``Jerry's too nice a guy. He cares too much,'' Cuban said. ``Sometimes, when a competitor like Google comes along, you've got to get mean and you've got to get tough.''

Yahoo spokeswoman Kim Rubey declined to comment.

Yahoo, owner of the second-most popular Internet search engine after Google, has fallen to less than half the $31 a share Microsoft bid for the company in January. The company is cutting 10 percent of its 15,000 employees to lower costs after falling sales reduced third-quarter profit.

``They've got a lot of avenues they could take but all of them depend on being a lot meaner and a lot more aggressive and that's just not their style,'' said Cuban, who sold Broadcast.com Inc. to Yahoo for $4.6 billion in July 1999.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who sought Yahoo's Internet search business, went as high as $33 in last-ditch talks with Yang.

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn joined Yahoo's board in August after agreeing to call off a campaign to challenge the directors in a shareholder election. Cuban was part of the slate Icahn had proposed.

Yahoo fell 22 cents to $12.14 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading and has tumbled 48 percent this year. Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington, dropped 10 cents to $23 and has declined 35 percent this year.

Cuban, who has expressed interest in buying the Chicago Cubs baseball team from Sam Zell's Tribune Co. media company, said he has ``no idea'' if he will succeed. The difficulty in obtaining credit in the current market has created uncertainty, he said.

```When the cost of capital goes up, the pricing of assets goes down,'' Cuban said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Michael White in Los Angeles at mwhite8@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: October 29, 2008 16:08 EDT