The New York Post reported last week that Microsoft is in talks with Yahoo to possibly negotiate an acquisition.  What does this news mean?   Well, it probably means that Yahoo is fucked if this deal doesn’t go through.  Remember that Yahoo used to be the darling of silicon valley, Jerry and David were the Larry and Sergie of the late 90s.  After surviving the dot.com bust, Yahoo looked pretty successful.  They survived all those horrible acquisitions and poor planned new product launches.  Then came Google.  Remember those days when Yahoo used Google to supplement the in-house search results?  Well, I do.  It was a brilliant tactic to move users off the Yahoo platform on to Google’s own search site.  So as Yahoo built up its web portal franchise, Google perfected search. 

Now we come to the present.  Google has built critical mass in online advertising, they have one trick and its working really well.  Yahoo is now in perpetual purgatory, other than flickr, sports and finance, I don’t know any other Yahoo asset that my friends visit  Yahoo is slowly dying and everyone knows it. 

blah blah blah, iphone this, iphone that.

But, from Digg, Boy Genius is reporting that AT&T sent an e-mail to their employees limiting vacation for the June 15th to July 15th time period.  The e-mail suggest this will likely be the ‘biggest selling period we have seen in a few years.’

Another unverified, unsubstantiated rumor.  But we love these, right?

God, I love spring playoff season.  There more games on TV than the networks can handle - and unlike the regular season, these games matter.

-Houston lost AGAIN in the first round.  They could not get an offensive board to save their life last night, in the deciding game 7 at home.  T-Mac has still never emerged from the first round of the playoffs.

-That means the Warriors who pulled of a miracle on Thursday will play Utah in the semis.  I HATE utah, btw, and this is going to be a great series.

-The Red Wings are one game away from sending the San Jose Sharks home.  Although the Sharks were favored by many in this series - and at times looked much better than the wings, they have lost momentum.

-The Cavs are quietly looking very, very good.  They decisively won their quarter final round against the Arenas-less Wizards in four games, and are now one game up on the 6th seed Nets.

-Thank god the Heat are out.  I hate shaq.

-I don’t really know much about boxing, but I know that Mayweather beat Oscar de la Hoya, the so-called ‘Golden boy.’  Vegas was all about the fight when I was there, to the point where bomb sniffing dogs roamed the casinos for added security.

-Is there another famous boxer other than De la hoya?  I can’t think of one.  I mean, I don’t follow it very closely but before I could name at least a few of these guys.  After de la hoya retires - no one.

-The most expensive room in Vegas?  Perhaps it’s the $25,000 a night Hardwood Suite at the Palms.  This 10,000 square-foot suite features a basketball half court among it’s many amenities.  It’s a good idea actually - there are what, 500 or so NBA players, and where else could they possibly stay in vegas?

On Friday, Yahoo! rose 10% following rumors of an acquisition by Microsoft.  Apparently, talks of an acquisition have been occurring since last year, with prices in the ballpark of $50 billion suggested for Yahoo!.

But it seems, following news from late Friday and Saturday, that both companies are more interesting in exploring a ‘partnership,’ which is code for ‘we couldn’t get the acquisition to work.’

Yahoo! has gone from a Internet star, to a near-casualty of the dot com bust, to an also-ran eclipsed by fast moving web 2.0 companies and, of course, Google.

Microsoft has also struggled with its net initiatives, at least.  The company’s much hyped ‘Live’ services initiative consists of an expansive yet incohesive mix of mostly unknown services.

But will an acquisition help either company to combat Google?  At this point, Google’s momentum is so strong it’s seems unlikely that even a MSFT/Yahoo! tag team could slow it.  More importantly, Yahoo! and Microsoft has been unable to compete with Google on the web - they have been playing catchup for four years.

Much of the hype these days seems to be on smaller web 2.0 companies that get quickly gobbled up by others.  It may make more sense for MSFT to concentrate on acquiring these smaller companies, rather than blowing a $50 billion load for Yahoo!.  After all, both Microsoft and Yahoo! now seem too bloated and too slow to drive organic innovation.

Hopefully we’ll see more news on this tomorrow.