The semi-big news that Microsoft and Yahoo–united, as Dealbreaker charmingly put it, by their “love of Latin sounding next-gen technological platforms (Vista for Microsoft, Panama for Yahoo)”–are again talking to each other about maybe, you know, getting together seems to have left just about everybody but Yahoo’s long-suffering shareholders distinctly underwhelmed. The idea would be to band together to battle the mighty Google, but it just seems like it would be such an unwieldy, dysfunctional company. A shared online advertising network could make sense–and it’s entirely possible that’s all that will come of this.
But the prospect of a merger does at least raise the truly interesting question of what they would call the new entity. Yacrosoft and Microhoo are the two most obvious, but Yahoo is so much smaller than Microsoft that perhaps Yicrosoft or Microsoftoo would be more appropriate. Microsohoo? Yahsoft? Microshoft? The possibilities are endless! (Plus, I’m told the name Cendant might be available.) Sadly, a more likely outcome would be that the company would just be called Microsoft, with Yahoo its main online brand.