The Economist seems to think so in its article "The Microhoo! hoo-hah". The Economist states in the closing paragraph:
"By responding on February 4th to Microsoft's bid by offering whatever support Yahoo! might require, Google may have walked into Microsoft's sucker punch. For whatever adverse effects on competition might result from Microsoft buying Yahoo!, the impact of a closer relationship between Google and Yahoo! would surely be worse."
This is an interesting twist on the bid, and although I think the purchase of Yahoo is important to Microsoft, I would not put past Steve Ballmer to have come up with this potential antitrust twist...
A lot of people seem to be looking for interesting twists to this story because otherwise they're just left scratching their heads.
It seems that there's widespread agreement that Microsoft offered too much for Yahoo, and plenty of people trying to figure out why MS is bothering at all. The Economist article you linked to certainly conveys this.
So where's the promise of innovation? Based on Microsoft's history and the qualities of this deal, most articles I've read see a promise of more scummy marketing tricks and monopolistic gimmicks.
Oh, and "the search-engine market surely has more monopoly power nowadays than the desktop market"... what is he smoking?
Posted by: Chris Carlin | February 08, 2008 at 06:46 AM