Is Microsoft buying Yahoo?????

[AmericanOnlineMall]

Did anyone else hear this?? I will be richhhhhhhhhh

[AmericanOnlineMall]

Microsoft-Yahoo! deal hopes are revived
http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/006200705051340.htm

[AmericanOnlineMall]

Well Guys I am Back I Know All Of You Missed Me ,

[fernimac]

I hope not. We have already too little competition here. If Microsoft buys Yahoo, there will be less contenders and that won't be good for users.

[cw1865]

I agree, call out the anti-trust watchdogs on this one.

[Martinscholes]

I agree, call out the anti-trust watchdogs on this one.

I agree with this point. Can't have too many of the Internet's eggs in one basket.

[carbonize]

I hope not. We have already too little competition here. If Microsoft buys Yahoo, there will be less contenders and that won't be good for users.

To little competition for what? There is a plethora of search engines out there as can be seen just by checking your logs. There is nothing these two companies offer that many other companies don't also offer.

[PaulMycroft]

This might help challenge the stranglehold Google has over many people and businesses.

[AVC]

I think the deal will go through since Yahoo is laying off people, they need money now, Microsoft and Yahoo have been talking about this for years now.

It will be good for webmasters also, Live.com has in the last few months been sending more traffic to many sites while Yahoo is having a difficult time holding a decent search index going back to the Big Daddy era when Google and even MSN were all having problems due to the fast growth of the web and spam webmasters.

[Martinscholes]

This might help challenge the
stranglehold Google has over many people and businesses.

Challenge one monopoly by allowing another to be created? Not too sure about that. Though I see where you are coming from.

[AVC]

The name of the game is users using search to find websites, if Microsoft and Yahoo can deliver traffic with great search results I'm all for it, some sites get 90% of their search traffic from G and that is not good.

[fernimac]

Here in Europe, and specifically in Spain, Google is in a very dominant position, with more than 90% of the search market. That is not good, but the merge between Microsoft and Yahoo is not going to do it any better.

[carbonize]

The problem both Yahoo! and MS face is the same one faced by the creators of new audio codecs such as OGG and WMA. Whilst yours might be better people are slow to catch on to new things. For a long time MP3 was the only lossy format for audio files and it's what people got used to. Hell the iPod was is refered to as an MP3 player even though for a long time it only played AAC files. The same problem faces search engines. Google came along and gave the results you wanted for your search. The name Google is now synonymous with searching the internet. People don't say are you going to search for it, they say they are going to Google it. I personally have Ask set as my home page at home and hopefully IE7 having Live as it's only search engine for the search box when you first install it might help drive traffic their way. But then you get people who are paid by Google for sending traffic their way. Install Firefox and the default homepage is a specially designed page on Google and Mozilla get paid for sending people there.

[AVC]

Microsoft has a big advantage over Google long term, they own the monopoly on the PC OS which will give M$ a foot in the door with billions of computer users by default.

Yahoo gives Microsoft a lot of mobile assets which is a market Google is going after also.

[carbonize]

Microsoft has a big advantage over Google long term, they own the monopoly on the PC OS which will give M$ a foot in the door with billions of computer users by default.

Not really given that most copies of Windows are OEM versions and the vendor has usually set the home page and search engine to whatever they have chosen.