Will Carol Bartz’s Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) make any big deal with MSFT, AOL or even News Corp ? The new CEO has indicated she is not as interested in a transformational search deal for the embattled internet giant. And now, the main M&A team exec who was leading the talks with Microsoft and others earlier last year, Gerald Horkan, Yahoo’s SVP of corporate strategy, has left the company and hasn’t been replaced, according to the WSJ. M&A has been slow at Yahoo recently; the company has typically chosen to do a series of smaller acquisitions, say Flickr or MyBlogLog. This comes as Yahoo’s major reorg of execs and products continue, and Bartz continues to study the business to streamline it.

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Whenever she picks someone for the role, the choice will help define Yahoo’s M&A strategy going ahead. An outsider may mean Bartz will think differently on M&A, but the likely choice may be to stay the course for now, company insiders have said. Meanwhile, external analysts continue to elaborate on the ways and benefits of doing a search merger between Yahoo and Microsoft.