As far as I can tell, Yahoo did a lease/sale deal with Microsoft, thereby exiting the growing online search business to focus on the fragmented, super-competitive, online media business. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and her advisors said they could not marshal the capital to fight against the billions in R&D that Microsoft and Google were spending and planning to spend on search. Yahoo’s mistake is that they want to fight the last war — traditional search and traditional “portal” control.