Five reasons Yahoo should stop trying to buy AOL

Each Yahoo acquisition prediction — will they buy Facebook? YouTube? Ebay? Will they sell to Disney? — is followed by expert analyses of each theoretical deal's implications. So now that Fortune says Yahoo wants to buy AOL from Time Warner, let's list the...

Five reasons this is the worst possible deal for Yahoo

Yahoo's current motive is to overtake Google in traffic, income, or value. AOL recently fired thousands of employees and is struggling to keep its user base. Why buy a shrinking property?
If Yahoo can afford AOL, it can afford Facebook, Six Apart, Technorati, and all kinds of other healthy dot-coms. Hell, I'll list them in the next post.
Yahoo is worth $35 billion in stock, and the company has just $3 billion in cash. AOL might be worth $10-15 billion. Even if it spends all its cash, Yahoo will still have to give a lot of stock to Time Warner.
Yahoo may want to replace CEO Terry Semel (pictured here, out of fashion on two levels). But they won't find one among AOL's execs — no great leader stands out at that company, unless one counts has-been Vice Chairman Ted Leonsis or loudmouth Netscape head Jason Calacanis. (And one should not count them.)
Clunky, cluttered, and unhip, AOL is a symbol of everything that makes Yahoo #2 and Google #1. If anything, it will hemorrhage money and lose users. Worst. Deal. Ever.