Gates and Ballmer will take the stage in a few hours at The Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital Conference in Carlsbad, Calif. They will be interviewed by tech journos Kara Swisher and Walter Mossberg.

Expecting news on Microsoft's efforts to make a deal with Yahoo? I'm not. Particularly now that they're offering a juicy bit of Windows 7 detail.

Despite the high-profile speaking slot for Gates and Ballmer, this is not the venue I'd expect Microsoft to drop any significant news on Yahoo (or Facebook for that matter). And, after a long, extremely quiet weekend, there might not be much news to drop. However, given the lineup of speakers -- Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker are on tap at D6 tomorrow -- and the intense interest with which Swisher has covered the saga, there could be some hint about the direction of reportedly ongoing talks.

Also on the program are Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Jeff Bewkes of Time Warner (parent of AOL) and Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. -- basically all the major players, except for a little company called Google, mentioned in the M&A madness that has dominated tech headlines for the last four months. (Carl Icahn isn't on the speaker list, either.)

Maybe they can all take the stage at once and just work things out in the open.