The fight over Yahoo will have many unfortunate side effects if any of the combination outcomes currently being considered come about. How did we get here? Back when Terry Semel was first announced as the new CEO, I thought it was a huge mistake (wish I had started to blog a long time ago so that I could now link to that). My reasoning was that conceiving of Yahoo in terms of media first rather than technology first was missing the opportunity. That is the only way to create a mass media opprtunity was through flawless technological execution. But then Semel surprised me with what I thought were two clever acquisitions to jumpstart Yahoo’s own search (Inktomi) and advertising (Overture). Turns out though that apparently instead of considering these as jumpstarts and aggressively pushing the integration and further development or replacement of these technologies that was pretty much it. So Yahoo became a house built on a slapped together and crumbling foundation. Combining Yahoo with AOL or MSFT/NWS would compound the errors of the past, not solve them. It is probably too late but the healthiest outcome for the Internet at large would be an independent Yahoo.