I’ve been plenty critical of Microsoft’s plans to acquire Yahoo!, so I think it plenty fair to give credit where credit is due. And that’s the case with Microsoft’s recently announced Rapt acquisition. This is a good fit for Microsoft’s Advertiser & Publisher Solutions group.

And yes, I managed to refrain from all sorts of rapt references.

Now for the gritty details. Rapt is kind of like a Rand Corporation for online publishers. They do all sorts of mathematical modeling, algorithms and such. I could pretend that I don’t know what Operations Research is, but I did study large scale systems just up the street from ORSA. At least it was called ORSA at the time, and it was a couple of blocks from Penn Station in Baltimore.

For online publishers, Rapt provides tools to address the counter-intuitive discipline of yield management, revenue management and sales operations. I mention the OR angle, because this is what it’s all about — knowing that it’s better to not sell all of your advertising inventory at premium prices … and that you’ll actually make more money by keeping some inventory in reserve and selling it at auction.

This isn’t exactly a Nash equilibrium, which A Beautiful Mind did a reasonably good job of explaining. Yield management is equally counter-intuitive and mind-bending. And being smart isn’t enough. If you’re in ad ops, you need the kinds of things that Rapt can offer.

And now Microsoft can offer it.

Which makes me wonder. The aQuantive folks are pretty sharp. I wonder if Microsoft will let them run Yahoo! That might make things interesting.