Microsoft Deal Makes Yahoo Hate Itself

I’m not sure which is a worse sign of trouble: creating a Web site to talk yourself into loving a deal you hate in your heart of hearts, or having your CEO (in this case Carol Bartz) send a reassuring note to employees. But there’s no way Yahoo engineers can be comforted by this lie — I mean line:

Some of the biggest brains in the business work on Yahoo! Search, and they will continue to innovate to create a better search experience on Yahoo!. As a result of the deal, Microsoft, which has great technologists and deep pockets,will have the scale to bring users faster, more useful and more personally relevant search.

So Yahoo search engineers can rest assured that their jobs are safe, even though Microsoft’s engineers are really great. As Frederick Lardinois at ReadWriteWeb noted, members of the Yahoo Search team will likewise probably not  be enamored of the back-handed compliment to the effect that Yahoo

used to offer a “great” search experience, but that Bing will offer an “awesome” one… Bartz announced that some employees from the Yahoo search team will move to Microsoft, while others will move to the display business.

But really, what’s to like about this deal if you’re Yahoo? You’re essentially outsourcing search technology to Microsoft and hoping it will want to renew the deal when it expires. And what if Microsoft continues to lose ground to Google?

Jordan Golson at GigaOm has the sickening details here.

[Image courtesy of Yahoo]