Google/Yahoo Search Partnership Announcement At 1:30 This Afternoon
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I love Google. They're a model company, but in a 1.5 player market (Google being one player, Yahoo being .3 of a player and Microsoft being .2 of a player), you just can't allow the top two to collude together. Unless the partnership is merely giving Yahoo a fork of PageRank, it's going to be crappy - and it isn't that.
Also you misunderstand Anti-trust law. The U.S. system allows you to be a monopoly in a market due to you create efficiency in that area. But as long as you try to leverage that influence on new market with unfair competition, you open the gate to hell for yourself.
I thought in 2000 that MS is so unbeatable. But I have no respect for them just 5 years later. It can happen to Google in next 10 years, too.
What stops Microsoft from successfully competing with Google starting right now? They freaking OWN 67% of the browser market and 94% of OS market, so they own the address bar and default search setting in nearly every PC sold! How much more leverage do you need???
And yet it's not enough to fight Google off - people keep changing the default search and default homepage setting to http://google.com in every brand-new installation of IE. Why would you want to help that company? And how was Yahoo supposed to help them?
This isn't the auto-industry where mergers help you out with sharing manufacturing plans, part bins, "platforms" and dealer networks. This kind of shit is FREE on the Internet: all you have to do is to build a superior product, it takes seconds for customers to switch.
Message to Microsoft: simply start to innovate again with your engineering, just like you used to against IBM, Lotus and Netscape, forget all that shady marketing BS and half-assed mergers with losers.
What's keeping it up is the continued possibility of a stockholder revolt, which is precisely what needs to happen. (Supposedly, someone was organizing it, but I haven't followed along.) The stockholders need to oust the whole board, and replace it will a cleanup crew, who'll sell out to microsoft.
A google/yahoo buyout won't happen. The gov't (hopefully) wouldn't allow it.
> Yahoo Stock is down sharply based on this story and a follow up by Reuters.
It was the "follow up" by one of the most widely read and respected news sources. Once it hit Reuters and WSJ it was up on Drudge, CNN, etc. That caused the stock to dive, not a mention on TC inbetween Twitter rants.