Culturally not financially speaking, this is disappointing news for anyone who appreciates Yahoo’s special flair in online services, all of which will certainly disappear if Microsoft takes it over. Financially of course it may or may not make sense to Yahoo’s shareholders. For Microsoft, it’s yet another another multibillion-dollar admission of its almost utter lack of consumer sprachgefuhl. Here the WSJ, in a story analyzing Steve Ballmer’s strategies, compares the company’s success selling to companies rather than, you know, actual people:

Despite a tough climate of business technology spending, Microsoft has expanded sales of Windows, Office and new products to companies large and small. One example: Microsoft’s server and tools group has posted more than 20 consecutive quarters of double-digit-percentage growth.

On the consumer side, Microsoft is struggling. Mobile phones, music players and online services have sucked up tens of billions of Microsoft’s profits in the past 10 years. It has failed to make a significant dent in the market share of leaders. The company’s Xbox videogame business has a strong place in the market and will probably make its first profit this fiscal year. Still, the business has lost untold billions of dollars since Microsoft sold the first Xbox in 2001.

Nowhere is the consumer challenge more stark than in online services, where Microsoft has bled money as Google has churned out profits.

Next comes the funny part of the Journal’s story:

Those losses come as Mr. Ballmer followed a proven Microsoft approach to new markets through what executives call “ground wars”: Microsoft’s engineers would build new technologies from scratch and improve them until the company bested a market leader.

That Microsoft would make such a big bid in such an important business is another sign its old ways are no longer working — and that Mr. Ballmer is willing to adjust his thinking to try to remake Microsoft’s culture.

Um, wasn’t the “proven Microsoft approach to new markets” just, uh, waiting for other companies to be successful at something the Borg couldn’t, and then either a) copying them or b) buying them up? (This of course is after the company’s perennial option one—tweaking Windows coding to give its latest product an advantage there, whether consumers want it or not—is thwarted legally.) The Yahoo bid is really an admission that, when it comes to getting actual people to voluntarily use its products or systems, both approaches don’t work.

The offer quantifies one other thing, as well. The Journal refers to some 500 million monthly users of Yahoo services. That number includes many tangential interactions with the company, I’m sure; let’s say Yahoo has 250 million regular users. Microsoft, meanwhile, made an initial $44 billion dollar bid that is likely to rise. In other words, Microsoft, like a rich kid with whom the other kids won’t play, is saying, after years of schoolyard frustration, that it is willing to buy some new friends—at about $200 each.