When I was reading the news about the proposed Microsoft/Yahoo! deal, for some reason it recurred to me that I was speculating about Microsoft buying AOL in a Usenet forum back in 1997. Yahoo! isn't AOL and the idea was pretty far-fetched at that time, but interestingly enough Microsoft's rationale for buying Yahoo! at the beginning of 2008 looks similar to the rationale for buying AOL more than ten years ago.
