Sorry corn farmers, it looks like Yahoo's potential deal with Microsoft has gone away, and Yahoo and Google have finally agreed to a plan that hands off a bunch of Yahoo's search ad inventory to Google, basically admitting that Google is just better at serving the long tail of the advertiser market.

Basically, this means that the search ad market battle is settled, Google has won. Yahoo's mistake all along was trying to play catch up and to build its own Google, rather than focusing on doing something different. Hopefully, Yahoo can now reinvent itself to focus on providing something that's not just a Google competitor, but which actually provides a different value proposition to users. Of course, at the rate Yahoo seems to be bleeding talent these days, that might not be so easy. Plus, of course, the feds are almost certainly going to take up the cry of those corn farmers, and investigate whether or not the deal violates any sort of antitrust rules. That's going to be a major distraction as well. So, rather than focusing on Yahoo's struggles, perhaps it's time to go focus on the next interesting startup. After all, that seems to be what a bunch of Yahoo's employees are doing.

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