Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC?

I found that statement particularly amusing.
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Jokes apart, I am just thinking how microsoft will be using yahoo. I still hope yahoo remains independent but it seems the merger is bound to happen

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Poor Google.

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Yahoo has been dying on the vine for years. It’s sad really, because a good majority of my whole Internet experience has Yahoo in there. I remember back in the day, trying to get my sites approved and listed in the directory. I used to cross my fingers for a few months while I waited to get my listing approved… just hoping that the category editor didn’t have a fight with his wife before work and reviewing my site for inclusion.

I don’t like dot Com crashes very much. Having so many years vested into the Internet, it’s hard for me to adapt to dot Com failures. I have toured their headquarters in CA, had my picture taken standing next to one of their cool purple Yahoo! vehicles, met with many of the executives. I am very fond of Yahoo and its been bugging me for many years that they just let things slip away.

Realistically, this doesn’t have to be a Google world… many of the major search engines are just allowing it to happen. If you take Ask.com for example, and use their engine for search for a one week trial, you will find that their engine in many ways exceeds the accuracy of Google. However, Ask.com is almost one of the best kept secrets on the Internet. It’s a ghost town.

I have well over 100 websites online. All utilize Google Analytics. All my sites are extremely search engine friendly and score high percentages of search engine traffic over direct referrals. Time and time again, 85% of all my search engines traffic originates from Google organic search. The other 15% gets divided up between Yahoo, Ask and Live.

Google is amazingly huge and they have captured such a huge percentage of the market and have flown in under the radar and a huge trojan horse has been opened. I honestly don’t think even Microsoft can compete. Bill Gates, a few years ago, admits, “I never even saw them coming”… meaning Google just snuck right into a market that M$ could have easily dominated if the thought had occurred.

Microsoft at the time was too busy trying to fit their big inflated head through doorways as they sat on their high horse being proud about having OS and Web Browser domination. Little did they know at the time, what was cooking up in the search market.

Only time will tell what will happen, but I can say thing, 2008 is going to be a hell of a dust storm in the industry of search. If you’re not into stocks, it might not be a bad time to invest.

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@Baron
This move concerns me. It’s not so much about the way I feel about Microsoft (although I do have an opinion on that), but it’s more about having the competition landscape be reduced to fewer players. Now, with Microsoft specifically, I understand why they want to make this move, but I’m not entirely convinced how it will benefit everyone given that they own half the world’s OSes being used.

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From BusinessWeek: Maybe the biggest challenge Microsoft will face is cultural. Yahoo’s 14,300 employees come largely from the Silicon Valley world that loves to hate Microsoft. “Yahoo has always considered itself a bit of an upstart,” says a former Yahoo employee who asked to remain anonymous. “Most Yahoo employees will feel that, A., we lost, and B., there is no way in hell that I am going to work for Microsoft.”

Right now it looks like it’s possible that Yahoo could join Google instead, though I don’t like that idea either. Apparently, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has phoned Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang about making a pact, and analysts are speculating that such a partnership would have Yahoo using Google’s search and search ad system and splitting revenue. Hmmm.

But if Yahoo joins Microsoft, then just imaging integrating the two together seamlessly. Yahoo’s servers use PHP. Microsoft doesn’t like PHP as it’s free and has a license that obliges people to release any changes they make to it back to the community.

Microsoft uses its own web system called ASP for Windows Live, its online equivalent of Yahoo. Integrating Yahoo into Microsoft could mean tearing out PHP completely and replacing it with ASP, which would be a huge and enormously expensive project that is likely to bring no visible benefit to users.

IMHO, Microsoft is a monster monopoly that needs to be shrunk down, not grown. And I’m not at all convinced that the suits over at Microsoft will be able to bring the necessary innovations like Google has. Not to mention that I don’t trust Microsoft as far as I can throw them.

Guess we’ll just have to see how this one plays out. It might just be time for me to dump all my Yahoo accounts. I was bothered enough when they acquired MyBlogLog and merged it with my Yahoo mail login. I simply don’t want Microsoft having access to any of that.

Shine on,
Aaron

I think Mozilla should start the world’s most powerful open source, free search engine based on 100% democratic transparency. They could do it, and it would destroy the corporate machine. Let’s get a real solution people!

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