From the desk of Thom Buschman:

Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this as a financial writer that needs business news as well as people caring about business news – but every time I see a Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT)/ Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) / Carl Icahn (if he had a ticker it would be PROXY) story I want to throw-up.

Yes, I know that Microsoft is an important company (after all, I am typing this article on a laptop running Windows, though in the interest of full disclosure my desktop runs Linux) – it has a market capitalization of $275 billion thanks to its stronghold on the desktop environment and office suites, while maintaining impressive footholds in the video game console market and internet search (speaking of internet search, yes Microsoft is getting clobbered by Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) and has long been an also ran at third place by market share – but third place is still third place, and we are talking about searching the bloody internet, not third place in home blender sales).

I also know the interesting synergies/hopes to actually compete effectively in the internet sector’ raised by Microsoft combining with Yahoo (which is also getting clobbered by Google, the difference is that Yahoo doesn’t have an operating system or other software to fall-back on).

What annoys me to no end in the coverage of this strange dance – which seemed dead until every Bloomberg/WSJ/MSN Money/CNNMoney/MarketWatch reporter’s wet dream came true and billionaire trouble-maker Carl Icahn got involved and injected new life into the story (I mean deal… well, actually I mean story) – is the endless repetitive coverage and analysis of events from every angle and non-angle.

A simple search of Google News (which, incidentally, shows how Microsoft and Yahoo are getting clobbered by Google in search) lists 2,524 recent news articles on the possibility of a deal – everything ranging from the shareholder pressure, the likelihood of the recent pact turning into a full-blown merger, to Icahn’s trackrecord, to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s trackrecord, to the always slightly annoying (even if true – and yes I recognize the irony of me calling this annoying even though I have done it repeatedly in this article) reminders that Google makes a Microsoft/Yahoo combination irrelevant, to Google’s glee at the lack of success/distraction so far.

Every reporter needs to take a breath and stop reporting on the ‘maybe merger’ until an actual merger occurs (which it probably will) – and then they can begin the endless process of analyzing the terms of the deal, the synergies, the challenges ahead, Google’s response/dominance, Icahn’s reaction, Ballmer’s negotiating style, Yahoo CEO Jerry Wang’s legacy, and the new interior decorating of Yahoo’s former headqauarters, to name just a few stories.