Muhammad Saleem brought up a good point today on Twitter:

“Why do people think if companies like Microsoft and Yahoo! merge, that they would pick an idiotic name like MicroHoo or YaSoft?”

I think I’ve read every combination of the names Microsoft and Yahoo imaginable over the past several hours short of my personal pick: Matisyahu.

Seriously people, do you really think that if this deal goes through Microsoft is going to merge Yahoo’s name into theirs? No way, both are very powerful brand names, Microsoft would be foolish to rebrand themselves and they’d be just as foolish to drop the Yahoo! name from that company’s services.

What is still the #1 website in terms of worldwide usage? Yahoo.com. Are people going to stop typing that in and start typing in Microhoo.com, Yahoosoft.com, Mihoo.com, etc? No. That’s just silly.

When and if Microsoft buys Yahoo they will be known as: Microsoft and Yahoo. Sure maybe a few services will be branded as being “powered by Microsoft”, “powered by Live”, or “powered by Yahoo”, hell we might even see some kind of collaborative branding on new products, perhaps something like MY (Microsoft + Yahoo) – but we will not be seeing Microsoft turn into some gobblygook name – Yahoo is bad enough as it is.