Yang said he remains open to selling Yahoo at the right price, adding “people who know me know I don’t have an ego about remaining independent versus not remaining independent.” Ballmer left room open for future partnerships based on the two companies’ search engines, but was definitive on the point that Microsoft does not plan to acquire Yahoo.

With no Microsoft bid in sight and its Google partnership dead on arrival, Yahoo has reached what many analysts conclude is a strategic dead-end.

Why are Yahoo shareholders so in love with this guy?

No one seems to be bothered by the oligopolistic/monoplistic implications of this:  You have the parent of MSN with x % of the search space buying Yahoo with y % of the same market, isn’t this a bad idea for the end users/consumers/businesses that advertise?

As an end user, I like having the choice of MSN vs live.com vs. Yahoo.  They may overlap, but mostly do not.

As an advertiser I dread the increase in advertising costs since the whole will be munged together into one target audience size and higher fees.  Someone will have to pay for Yahoo besides MS.

Overall, this merger appears to be the latest in a series of oligopolistic advances taken by business where no one seems to be throwing up a flare.  Maybe people are reminiscing about the robber barons of the early 20th century and have decluded themselves into thinking that was a good thing.