Did anyone coin that yet? Am I the first? I don't know who came up with the whole "Microhoo" thing but I am sure they got their fifteen minutes of fame and I hope to emulate their monumentally trivial achievement in this venue with my own contribution on the impending Yahoo/Google partnership.

I think the best part of this (hopefully) final shot into the carcass of a Microsoft/Yahoo deal is that the leaks have started and we can finally see what exactly Microsoft was putting on the table and what they were hoping to find.

Most of what they were looking for was exactly what they said, which was search, which made sense, considering their own offerings in that area are terrible and Yahoo is at least mediocre. What they were offering was basically piles of cash, in a replenishing bucket, which they must have imagined would look pretty good to Yahoo given their financial situation. But more than money was at stake, at least for Yahoo; corporate identity seems to have been important, and taking away search would amount to a gutting of that identity, despite the fact that it is less and less of their business.

Still, I can't help but wonder if this outcome was exactly what Microsoft was really looking for all along: providing a deal that would look sweet financially (and so have every appearance to outside parties as being legitimate) but which would intentionally fail to accommodate those non-fiscal issues and so be doomed from the outset precisely in order to force Yahoo to seek refuge with Google and create a regulatory problem for Google (the real target all along) in the process, as I first outlined in this post long ago. Considering Kevin Johnson's leaked internal memo regarding the situation and implying no little joy at the potential for anti-trust action, one can almost hear the maniacal laughter emanating from 1 Microsoft Way.