• The Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, February 5, 2008 11 AM

The key to making a Microsoft-Yahoo deal work is to combine all or at least parts of the companies' ad delivery systems as soon as possible. Otherwise, Google will be able to take advantage of the halt in progress. Further down the priority list, Yahoo's email should be merged with MSN's Hotmail, a marriage that would give the combined company more than 600 million users.

Whereas the email services could co-exist separately for a while, the ad delivery systems cannot. That's a big reason the merger has been received so warmly, for the most part. It could sell ads across multiple platforms to an enormous user base using one system. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer admitted, "One can certainly speculate that we don't need two of everything."

The ramifications of how Microsoft merges with Yahoo are considerable, for Web users, advertisers and certainly, thousands of employees.

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