Many out there have talked about Microsoft and their possibility of acquiring Yahoo to help compete against Google in the search and online space. Jeremy Shoemaker gave 10 reasons why they would buy yahoo but I’m not sure it is going to happen or execute well if it does.

One of the major problems is Culture Clash – Ray Ozzie is having a hard enough time as is trying to get the “service” idea to Microsoft by all reports. An organization that has survived on the desktop and their software programs is not going to quickly integrate.

Additionally, they would have to get rid of Microsoft AdCenter (which is sort of a pain to deal with) and collapse down many other products. Yahoo does have a wide network but I’m not sure it would be easy to collapse all their services and integrate it with Microsoft. Whenever I’ve had to go to Microsoft.com, I’ve always found it to be a mess, overly verbose, and confusing. You don’t tend to see a Harvard educated man suddenly speak ebonics and I feel that is what is being asked of the programmers and people at Microsoft — it goes against the entire culture they have been raised in and conditioned to think from day one to suddenly switch to an open source “Yahoo!” vibe.
Sure Microsoft has the money and the need. All the numbers might add up but the logistical and cultural issues are a nightmare and they would still not have as powerful a brand as Google.
Yahoo needs to get better and really launch Panama right and perhaps bring MSN back into the fold as a partner. Kick out the junk sites and provide the best network for advertisers to launch offers and provide a counter weight to Google. They may be down but they are not out, but they have hammer on their strong points (community) and use their user base to launch new and innovative services that can capture and keep folks in the Yahoo network. Google may have the search traffic but people still stay at places like Flickr and Myspace a lot more.