Microsoft and AOL?

I read a blog post on Fortune by Michal Lev-Ram entitled "Report: Talks between Microsoft and AOL heat up" that once again has me hoping that Microsoft will finally see the wisdom of spinning off its MSN online "content" business, possibly to be combined with other media "content" operations such as Yahoo and AOL. My ideal transaction would be a standalone company combining the content operations of MSN, Yahoo, and AOL, with Microsoft and others as significant "joint" owners and with the combined content business utilizing Microsoft's online platform infrastructure for data centers, "cloud" computing, Web services, support for mobile devices, and "search." Whether such a combination will ever come to fruition remains to be seen. I am not particularly interested in Microsoft becoming even more of a "content" business by acquiring the "content" operations of either Yahoo or AOL.

Microsoft  should focus on the platform and infrastructure aspects of the Internet. Of course, this is only my own opinion.

-- Jack Krupansky