by Larry Dignan
July 2nd, 2008 @ 3:55 am

Microsoft still has the hots for Yahoo and now wants to enlist partners to win the target’s search business. Yes, folks the Microhoo saga continues and boy are these two crazy kids awkward.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Microsoft is still trying to airlift the search business out of Yahoo and is enlisting Time Warner and News Corp. to make a run at Yahoo. The beauty.pnggeneral idea is to break up Yahoo and pair non-search assets with MySpace or AOL. But the real meat of the story is the narrative behind Microsoft’s courtship of Yahoo and how executives from these companies just couldn’t get it right.

Microsoft is hell-bent on buying Yahoo. Yahoo balks. Microsoft gets cold feet. Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang’s face hangs when Microsoft walks. Then this awkward pair hooks up later to no avail. These two companies are flighty when it comes to deal making. It’s like an episode of Beauty and the Geek (partial cast right). Good luck figuring out whether Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer or Yang is the beauty.

In any case there are more than a few morsels to ponder in the Journal story, which if I were to guess was told from Yahoo’s side of the fence. After all, Yahoo made its case to shareholders on Monday and rolled out a timeline of events designed to show that Microsoft was the flighty party.