For two months, Yahoo leadership has been struggling to find a White Knight to rescue it from the clutches of MSFT's CEO Steve Ballmer. But its alternatives have been dwindling as Rupert Murdoch's News Corp (NYSE: NWS) turned away.

It looks like this meeting around the watering hole is just Yahoo saying to Microsft, "So what do you boys have in mind?," which will probably progress into, "I believe we can hang around with you fellas for a while."

From my perspective, any deal that ties MSN and Yahoo together will add some value to the web combination, but it is not certain that Yahoo under the wing of Microsoft will not lose some valuable freedom and much of its charm.

I would be much more in favor of Microsoft spinning off its internet assets into a separate company and combining that with Yahoo to create a new web powerhouse. That would pass regulators hurdles more easily and the unit would be free to add still more web properties -- perhaps even a MySpace, or dare I say it, perhaps even AOL.

It is hard to know what the end result of Monday's meeting in terms of deal structure, price, management and timing will bring in the end, but we can be sure Yahoo! and the web landscape continues to morph anew.

Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the design and research principal for an architecture & planning firm. He writes Chasing Value and Serious Money columns. Disclosure: I own shares of AOL parent company TWX.