“Brains! Must have Yahoo advertising brains!” That might have been Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s call as he finally made a deal for Yahoo. Sure, it looks like Yahoo still exists as an independent company, but in reality, Ballmer’s bite has turned it into a Microsoft zombie.

Yahoo has agreed to let is search engine brain, the only thing of value it really had, to be replaced by Bing, Microsoft’s “decision engine.” That’s a fancy Microsoft marketing phrase, which means it’s a search engine with a built-in bias towards giving pro-Microsoft search results.

As expected, Bing hasn’t made a dent in Google’s search share. Indeed, despite some reports of it hurting Yahoo’s search market share, I haven’t seen any proof that it did any real damage to Yahoo. Of course, Yahoo was already in a world of hurt and new CEO Carol Bartz quickly proved she wasn’t up to the job of reviving the ailing Internet giant.

With this deal, Yahoo has become a dead company walking. Yahoo has clearly given up on search. If you look closely you’ll see that even its ad platform Panama, is being replaced by Microsoft’s adCenter.

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