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Despite months of discussions, the deal never materialized, distressing many Yahoo shareholders and hastening Yahoo's replacement of CEO Jerry Yang with Carol Bartz. But what if Yang had gotten up on the other side of the bed one day a year ago and led his company to accept the offer?

It's impossible to know what would have happened, of course. But an exercise in speculation can be illuminating, as Philip K. Dick showed with The Man In The High Castle, a novel in which Nazi Germany and imperial Japan won World War II.

So let's suppose that Yahoo agreed to Microsoft's acquisition offer after bargaining Microsoft up a notch on the price tag to, say, $31 per share from the original $29.

First would have come the challenge of antitrust approval. But the Justice Department has shown itself to be more concerned with checking Google's power, taking Microsoft's side when it came to the ill-fated Yahoo search-advertising deal with Google.

The European Union has shown more antipathy toward Microsoft, but it, too, likely would have been spooked enough by Google's might that it would sign off. And given that the EU is only now getting around to the issue of Microsoft bundling a Web browser with its operating system, any big compunctions about Microhoo probably wouldn't have set in until 2015.

So Microsoft and Yahoo probably could have cleared that hurdle, but not quickly, and there are other details to reckon with, so let's suppose that the deal closed in August. Yahoo shareholders would have received a chunk of Microsoft shares and a wad of money that looks princely in comparison with the present $11.74 value of their Yahoo shares.

Sure, there would be some bellyaching, but all those institutional investors who were publicly griping about Yahoo's management would have been mollified--especially because revisionist history or not, the economy in August 2008 already was well on its way downhill, and Yahoo's stock likely wouldn't look so great.