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After several months of indecision regarding the Microsoft-Yahoo merger, Techmeme shares multiple reports that Yahoo and Microsoft are no longer going to consider any sort of partnership (including one from the Yahoo press room.. The reasoning behind this is likely because of billionaire Carl Icahn's possible involvement; it would be too complicated to have a partnership that included the billionaire.
Still, forum members wonder why this even happened. Why does Microsoft want Yahoo so badly? According to forum members, it's because Microsoft hasn't had the history of building such great products internally, so they buy products that are built by another team and then they rebrand them. (This is similar to big brands' approach towards other products, though, considering that Google is the company that bought YouTube.)
One WebmasterWorld member says that this is more of a political battle than anything else:
Yahoo's refusal to accept a deal with Microsoft is much more to do with [their] directors history and sentiment and directly acts against the interests of [their] shareholders.
That could be true. A DigitalPoint Forums thread shows that Jerry Yang isn't very happy.
Meanwhile, one wonders if there's going to be another Yahoo/Microsoft thread in the upcoming months. It seems to be like "one big mess," but it's also a never-ending one at that.
Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums, and DigitalPoint Forums (#2).
