answer:If you look at anything but the stock price, a Yahoo! – Microsoft merger would have been a terrible move for Yahoo! Historically, MS has destroyed the viability of companies that they have bought. Take a look at Hotmail, which was the #1 webmail service. MS forced them to make a painful and costly migration away from an open source platform and onto Microsoft products that have made them much less reliable and secure. Now they are the #3 webmail provider. The corporate cultures at the two companies are antithetical anyway, and the merger would have seen employees leaving in droves (which is why the management at Yahoo! immediately let their employees know they were against it). Even if all of that weren’t true, taking #2 and #3 and making them merge won’t oust Google as the top search giant. Taking 2 inferior products and putting them together just makes a larger, but still inferior, prooduct.