Microsoft and Yahoo On Again. Off Again. On Again. Wait, What?

I feel like the image that needs to go with this post is a stack of waffles judging by the amount of times we've written about the Microsoft and Yahoo on again / off again buyout affair.  It's made even more disappointing by how much I like Yahoo and how cringe-worthy its decisions throughout this whole mess have been.

I said recently that with the recent exodus of Yahoo staff, it had never been more ripe for the picking, and at a bargain basement price, no less. It seems the powers that be at Microsoft were thinking along the same lines, as by all appearances around the blogosphere and news outlets talks seem to have reopened between the software behemoth and the little search engine that couldn't.

I'm honestly not surprised to hear rumors of continued (or would it be resumed?) talks between Yahoo and Microsoft. I have a feeling the tone of these talks has changed dramatically, however. Oh to be a fly on the wall in that conference room, to hear the stubborn resistance give way to what may just be sobbing and begging as Yahoo watches its value plummet.

I am still not enamored of the idea of a stodgy, old school brand like Microsoft owning Yahoo. I don't think the company that brought us the twin abominations of Internet Explorer (all versions) and Vista should be running several of my favorite internet playgrounds like Flickr and del.icio.us, frankly. I have nightmares about all the negative ways it could change Yahoo and its properties from fun and useful to staid, stodgy and stale.

That said, Yahoo needs bought out. Period. At this point it almost doesn't matter by which company. It has spent the last few months proving that the powers that be at Yahoo can't run a company on the business side. It has bought a number of excellent web properties over the past few years only to let them sit idle and unleveraged. Heck, Yahoo didn't even make its properties really talk to each other until they made everything work with the same Yahoo login at some point this past year - hardly what I'd call leveraging for success.

Microsoft does one thing very well, and that is run a profit making business. If these rumors of further talks are true, by waiting until the death throes to step back in, it is proving that it knows how to get a good bargain. If Microsoft then does a good job leveraging Yahoo's stable of sites into something more cohesive and still fun, it may finally earn its street cred on the web. Now if we could just get Microsoft to dump Internet Explorer as an embeded browser…