Every now and then a news item comes by that I find just hysterical. Not so hysterical, mind you, that it couldn’t happen. But funny nonetheless.
I could not resist speculating on the consequences of a merger between Microsoft and Yahoo, to be named, I presume, Microhoo. First, the new company will need a logo, which will inevitably look something like this:

The advantages of such a merger is hard to deny. I can easily picture Steve Ballmer in a cowboy suit yelling “Microhoo!” in their T.V. commercials, while a chorus of CGI characters chant “where do you want to search today?”.
Frankly, it’s hard to see the benefits to Microsoft of such an arrangement, other than to provide the Office folks with a model for yet another completely new and incompatible user interface for Office 2009, this one with each application so full of custom user definable configurable widgets that the only thing missing will be space for the actual application content (not to mention the incorporation of annoying popup and layered adds that will appear on documents while you work on them).
The benefits to Yahoo, however, are undeniable and should strike terror into the execs at Google. With insight from Microsoft’s marketing folks, Yahoo will quickly be able to launch a new search service modeled after Microsoft’s product development techniques – one that is able to search sites that will not be launched for several years yet.
Will Googleclick (Google’s new name after purchasing DoubleClick) be able to use it’s total knowledge of the intimate details of every person’s life be able to overcome the challenge of Microhoo’s total control over every piece of computer hardware in the universe?
Only time will tell..