Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin

Oh, no! Here we go again? AOL-Time Warner redux.

If that instant analysis of one Yahoo shareholder is representative of Yahoo investors at large, Microsoft’s all-in bid for Yahoo is not being welcomed as a long-term equity booster.

When I broke the Microsoft-Yahoo news this morning to a holder of Yahoo shares, the investor looked forward to his own personal short-term financial gain, thanks to a generous Microsoft, but feared for the future of a (not so) integrated Microsoft-Yahoo.

Facile tech blogosphere punditry headlines: “Why Microhoo: To stop the Google machine,” courtesy of Dan Farber, ZDNet Editor-in-Chief.

Oh, if it were only true, though. Microsoft money and financial market power is NOT all it takes to out-Google Google, as Google’s own earnings report presentation yesterday reveals.Google disappointed Wall Street with its 2007 Q4 performance, but deflected responsibility by trying to move the blame to heavy hitter Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace. Google lamented large ad inventory in social sites that doesn’t “yet” monetize well, but shrugged of its decision to seek a long-term, exclusive right to serve those money-losing ads on MySpace and similar non-performing UGC properties. Microsoft has also ponied up to the tempting social graph, throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at Mark Zuckerberg for the “privilege” of calling his highly-trafficked, but not highly-monetized, Facebook a “partner.”Microsoft’s math now deems that a Number 2 plus a Number 3 can cancel out a Number 1!Web runners up Yahoo and Microsoft have stumbled against Google independently. If their respective managements could not figure out how to beat Google, a hard-to-combine merger of losing propositions does NOT make for a strong anti-Google front.