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Yeah...so on day 1, Bing goes after a bunch of exclusive indexing deals, and on day 2, Google does the same. Assuming you're a content provider who is willing to do a deal like this, and you're going to get roughly the same amount of money, who are you going to go with? Probably the guy who has 70% of the market. This seems like a quick way to get Google's market share to 80%.

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But the next question is: Who has the deeper pockets with which to throw more money to the content providers?

In Microsoft v. Google? They'll both run out of upside long before they run out of money, that is to say, both can spend amounts of money unbounded by the actual quantity they have as other bounds kick in first.

Just looked up the latest balance sheets. GOOG has $12 billion in cash, MSFT $6 billion. And GOOG had positive cash flow in their last quarterly, MSFT was negative.

One upside in that scenario might be making it more likely that Google would face antitrust proceedings :)

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