John Battelle's Searchblog

I agree; too much legalese. Where's the passion? Still, the first paragraph makes a good point: The combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! will create a more competitive marketplace by establishing a compelling number two competitor for Internet search and online advertising. The alternative scenarios only lead to less competition on the Internet.

John, or any other reader, I don't suppose you have a link to the statements Google made when it announced its bids for DoubleClick? It would be very interesting to read that, and compare.

Google is absolutely correct in this case. I wanted to move mail from a hotmail account to a gmail account today. Could I do it? No. Because microsoft will gladly import mail, but it won't let you transfer it out (they could easily do this by enabling POP or IMAP).

Could I do it the other direction? Sure. Google allows both POP and IMAP access from gmail accounts, because their attitude is that it's your data. Microsoft doesn't care about their users at all. It's amazing that they still have any.

Here are the Yahoo user's comments on the official Yahoo corp blog - to the possibility of a merger

http://ycorpblog.com/2008/02/01/our-response-to-microsoft%e2%80%99s-proposal

Although I can hardly be considered a M$ fanboi, I know, for having spoken with a lot of people would love for this to go through and create a true competitor to Google and its evil ways.

Go Microsoft (for once !)

I think it's getting really funny because for ages on Friday Google News, in the UK at least was showing a picture of Jerry Yang & Bill Gates with some text next to it claiming basically that they were acting like teenage girls and shouldn't worry about their body image. It was hilarious.

http://search-engine-war.co.uk/2008/02/google-offers-u.html

I still don't get it. They would just get more traffic and could consolidate some jobs. There is no reason why each company can't compete with Google's search on their own. And certainly there's no evidence that says they would miraculously be the king of search if they combined. Any buyout or merger of MS and Yahoo would put the two companies even further behind in search. As they scramble to tie the two companies together they would be distracted from their search product's core development and Google would take an even bigger share.

interesting, but helpfully news