• The New York Times, Tuesday, February 19, 2008 11 AM

There are integration problems facing a Microsoft-Yahoo merger. To be sure, the companies have different corporate cultures--Yahoo is a generation younger than Microsoft--but they're both bureaucratic and rife with fiefdoms. How swiftly these bureaucracies come to an agreement about what services-and employees-stay will be very important, as there's a lot of overlap between Yahoo and MSN.

Far easier said than done. According to former Yahoo exec Rob Solomon, current CEO of travel search engine SideStep, Microsoft and Yahoo "are completely at odds with each other," when it comes to technology. Indeed, the companies run "two complex and almost entirely incompatible software systems" that has to be integrated. Microsoft's is built on proprietary software; Yahoo's is constructed of Linux-based open source programs.

The danger is that Google will charge ahead as Microsoft and Yahoo struggle to figure out the merger. That's why some analysts believe Microsoft might decide to keep Yahoo's services and technology largely separate, and then sell off the parts that overlap. That would be an unprecedented step for Microsoft--but it would also prevent products and services from merging.

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