Microsoft + Yahoo!=Microhoo—Hah!

Yahoo! is not worth $44 billion. Period. You could buy General Motors lock, stock, and barrel for $14 billion, name all the cars "Google Sucks," and get more bang for the buck.

Microsoft shareholders should thank their lucky stars that the company is not merging with Yahoo! A $44 billion dollar merger of two honest-to-gosh behemoths is not something that would ever work in a million years. Just look at Microsoft's track record with mergers. For the most part, it stinks.

I recall, back in the pre–dot-com era, when Microsoft bought WebTV for something like $400 million (one-hundredth of what it was going to spend on Yahoo!)—its biggest deal up to that point. What ever happened to WebTV? It kind of sat there in limbo, and part of it morphed into MicrosoftTV, which was a response to AOL TV and some other crap coming onto the market. It was a joke.

By the way, for years, Microsoft was preoccupied with AOL the way it's now preoccupied with Google. Hence the MSN squander-fest.

There has been a slew of ridiculous Microsoft failures, but nothing that comes close to the potential Yahoo! debacle. This whole episode reminded me of the crazy wife in the 1985 Albert Brooks movie Lost in America. The movie is about a couple who take their savings and buy an RV to see the country. They make a quick stop in Las Vegas, and almost within minutes, the dingbat wife gambles away their "nest egg."

Hello, Steve Ballmer.

What seems strange to me—stranger than Ballmer's plan to blow the Microsoft nest egg to buy Yahoo!—are the idiotic Silicon Valley analysts who were encouraging the deal. Wait, did I say idiotic? Ah yes, idiotic. It's as if the entire high-tech financial community was thinking that this was a great idea and the only way Microsoft could compete with Google, ever.

Earth to Silicon Valley: Microsoft competes with Google in only a small way. Microsoft makes most of its money from an operating system and something called the Office suite. Google makes no OS or any serious office software, except some online crap that actually competes with software from 1985 (Remember the company Personal Software and its simple word processor and other easy-to-use stuff?).