News About Merging of Yahoo! and Microsoft

News about the acquisition of Yahoo! by Microsoft is all over the internet and they say that this is due to Bill Gates wanting to compete with Google in online domination. And it will be purchased for US$44 billion dollars approximately. But just looking at the situation, the reason why Yahoo! is shrinking is due to the fact that more than 3/4 of search engine market was already dominated by Google (see Fig 1 below). And even if they merge it will have not much impact on Google. Yes Microsoft dominates the software industry but internet is a different thing. Although Internet explorer is the most popular browser in the world, still, it’s really the people themselves who will decide which search engine to use unless IE browsers have a built in blocking plug-in that will block anything that comes from Google. But that idea will tarnish Microsoft’s reputation and Google will be in a win-win situation.

Fig 1.

Really, Google’s success was phenomenal and one of the reason I think, is how it touched people’s lives like it became a God sent to all webmasters and online entrepreneurs. Why? it is the small people like us who promote big companies like them. In my observation it started when Adsense was introduced that sky rocketed their business. With a combination of state of the art contextual advertising and the with a very competitive payout which was available to all publishers around the world unlike Yahoo! Publishing Network which is only available in the US. But Microsoft have lot of money with a market cap of US$303 billion to support Yahoo! and still dominates the PC desktop and browser market and with that amount we will never know what will happen next. So we just have to wait and see the new buzz of a company called “MicroHoo!” (pronounce: Micro’-Who?).

 Update-04FEB2008: Yahoo! is considering Google’s help and to thwart Microsoft’s offer.