MSFT’s desire to acquire Yahoo displays a lack of imagination. They will never beat Google at their game. Google is too deeply entrenched as the “go-to” search engine in the present format of search. What MSFT needs to do is change the game. MSFT… don’t by an ice truck company… invent the refrigerator. Is there someone from MSFT whom I could contact to discuss my ideas?

The problem is not to embrace open networks as the holy grail. The issue is that the world has gone absolutely crazy with free content online. Why? Because they perceive the revenue model being advertising based and not content based.

The reason for the problem of content not being salable is the lack on innovative tools to make a seemless transaction that is not intrusive to the experience of the consumption of said content.

Remember, ISPs are collecting fees for content at present whether we accept this concept or not by giving access. It make no sense at all that a distributed network be any different then the real marketplace in your town or mine, unless we all agree to live in some utopia where money and income fulfill intrinsic need to survive in a market economy of consumption.

The whole system will correct itself, believe me. Its inevitable.

Buying Yahoo would be a very big headache for Microsoft:

- Cultural differences - most of the staff don’t like Microsoft and most of the time have spoken against them

- As far as I know, none of Yahoo runs Microsoft software for it’s applications or server management.

- Backlash of large amount of Yahoo users WILL move (to Google?).

Why a red herring? To force someone else to bid and pay over the odds for a troubled darling of the Internet. Thus weakening the competition (both the acquirer and Yahoo themselves due to the necessary focus on the takeover operations), and at the same time removing large amounts of available funds from development of more ‘anti-Microsoft’ solutions.

Great tactics worthy of any scholar of SUN TSU - The Art of War.

I agree that their are things that yahoo doesn’t do very well, but they do some thing very very well that I would hate for MS to get their hands on and mess with. . . .

Everything about Yahoo’s mid-level technology leadership was right in place. They had vision, enthusiasm, and the kind of sunny optimism that you need in a valley where suits block the tracks.

Everything, almost to a ‘T’, was the fault of a management gone awry. Shame on you Semel, Decker, and Yang for destroying one the Internet’s august properties and feeding to the lions.

Information is what keeps a society informed and (hopefully) prevents the creation of an oligopoly or plutocracy. Notice that one of the first steps of dictatorial regimes is to shut down sources of information: broadcast stations, cell phone communications and internet access. This is what happened recently in Burma and people still don’t know the story of the crackdown.

Google is not a “portal”, it is a filter. People recognize when the filtering is done in a heavy handed manner as in China, but with Google now having over 60% of the worldwide search market anything it does to shape access can have profound repercussions. A simple mis-indexing can cause a site to “disappear”. Their ranking system has also been the source of much discussion and game playing. Much of this has been for commercial advantage, but attempts at “Google bombing” have had political motivations.

What happens when there are only two search engines and they are told to suppress certain information from appearing in responses to searches? The ease with which the telecom companies went along with wiretapping requests from the government gives a hint of how much resistance the search firms are likely to put up when told to censor for “national security” reasons.

Democracy cannot function without a free flow of information, having two “portals” is not a good way to ensure this.