Here comes the Biggie.. Microsoft keen on Yahoo acquisition!

Just wondering.. Did it all start with Yahoo Messenger's integration(almost) with its Microsoft's Counterpart???
So here comes the biggest story of the day - Microsoft have approached Yahoo (once again!) tryin' to work out on some kind of a merger/acquisition between the two! Now thats more like acting on a do-or-die kind of a platform.
According to New York Post,

The new approach follows an offer Microsoft made to acquire Yahoo! a few months ago, sources said. But Yahoo! spurned the advances of the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant. Wall Street sources put a roughly $50 billion price tag on Yahoo!

Attack is often the best line of defence! Its evident that Microsoft has been stung badly after the DoubleClick deal went in Google's favor. I had written then about the analysts speculating a possible MSFT-YHOO merger; and its been barely a couple of weeks since then.
Microsoft hasn't been having the smoothest of times -
- Vista delay already getting a rough panning
- Apple has been a revelation with iPod and seems to be workin' hard on the Mac OS X (Leopard)
- MSN's steadily declining % share (down to 9.1% from 13% last year)
- Losing the DoubleClick deal to Google

On the other hand, Yahoo has been facing the music for a while as well. With the profits falling down below 10% for the first time ever last quarter, its not been a rosy start to the year for them either.
Both Yahoo and Microsoft have been trying to improve their search engines and also trying to gain some of the lost ground in web/mobile advertising. A successful merger and the two companies would account for about 27 percent of the world’s Web search queries, compared with Google’s share of about 65 percent, according to data from comScore.
But such 'huge' deals often look tough until they come off. Consider this, Yahoo possess a market cap of $40 Billion and Microsoft $290 Billion.. Did I refer to this one as a 'huge' deal? Damn.. its a 'giant' one!
Further, even if the deal does go through, things won't be very easy. Corporate cultural differences could lead to a lot of senior folks leaving the board. On the other side, a lot of Yahoo users might just look elsewhere after their merger with the Seattle giant.
Whatever happens, its definitely one helluva war going out there. Time to see what's King Bill going from here on..