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Google And Microsoft Cross Swords Over Yahoo!
watzinaneihm writes "In a blog post Google has called Yahoo/Microsoft merger bad for the future of the internet. It is worried about the number of email and IM accounts this merged entity would control. Microsoft has countered with the argument that Google is actually the big bully in this instance, with most of the search market already tied up. The New York Times, in the meantime, has accused Google of a Microsoft fixation."
I love how Microsoft's take on the merger is that it will create more competition. Why is it that any time a big company swallows a smaller one, we're told that having fewer players in the field will increase competition? Do people actually buy that line of bull? Someone get these guys a dictionary.
MSFT countered the Google announcement that, "What Google is doing is throwing some FUD. Trying to scare people using monopoly, proprietary and other such terms. MSFT considers this tactic illegal, since we have innovated, invented and patented the FUD technique. We consider all forms of FUD dissemination to be an exclusive intellectual property right of MSFT and nobody else has any legitimate claim to it. We will add this to the tally to 293 patent violations against MSFT by Linux and its accomplice Google."
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
So Google voice a legitimate worry about Microsoft, a company convicted of abusing its monopoly status in one market to dominate other markets, buying a company that would give them a large portion of a market and they are the bad guys in this? Lets be honest what Google is saying is the first thing that came to the minds of everyone in IT who are not on the Microsoft payroll. We all know how Microsoft works and we can all hazard a guess at what their aims are in attempting to purchase Yahoo. It is doubtful the good of the internet and consumers are particularly high on their list of priorities.
Google has a Microsoft fixation? Ok, I'm not willing to argue that, but I think the fixation railroad runs both ways. It's pretty obvious that Microsoft is more than a little pre-occupied with Google.
Screw whether anyone has a monopoly in the search market; Google frankly deserve that monopoly (not exactly at Windows levels, though; only 75%) because they're THE BEST SEARCH ENGINE.
:-(
Now, if Google bought out Yahoo instead, that would be likely to lead a a lot of positive things:
- Some degree of maintenance of the Yahoo brand (MS would obliterate it)
- Promotion of backend opensource architecture (MS would enforce MS products)
- Less likelihood of services being charged for (MS would ruthlessly monetize all Yahoo services as much as possible)
Frankly, I just hate Microsoft's whole money-making diversity-killing business ethos, and you have to realise that a MS buyout of Yahoo would be a pretty terrible thing.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Microsoft would prefer a controlled^Wsecured Microsoft(r) Inter-Network, let's call it MSN for short
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
When it's Godzilla vs Godzilla, Tokyo gets trashed either way.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
So if I understand you correctly, the way for a monopoly to be stopped is to have a competing monopoly buy its nearest competitor?
Monopoly. As in one. This means there can only be one at a time. EVAR. Get some education, boi.
in a few years Google is buying Microsoft anyway.
.sig: No such file or directory
The idea that this would make Microsoft a bigger "monopoly" is unfounded because neither Microsoft nor Yahoo! has anywhere close to the highest marketshare of online searches or advertising.
.Mac. Somewhere between the two camps, probably closer to the the Google/AIM/.Mac camp, will be Jabber services.
.Mac are already talking together: iChat. Since Jabber already works with Google Talk, I would not be surprised if the integration between Google Talk and AIM is done via a Jabber server to server interface which would allow Jabber servers to talk to the AIM network as well.
While I agree that Google almost certainly has the lion's share of searches, the article specifically mentioned IM and e-mail. The majority of the non-techy people I know use either MSN, Yahoo!, or AIM for instant messaging and e-mail. The only people I know using Google Talk are my co-workers and one of my non-techy friends.
Microsoft will probably not be very willing to work with Google to integrate Google Talk with either MSN IM or Yahoo IM. This will effectively split IM into two camps. In one camp there will be MSN IM and Yahoo! IM. In the other camp you will have Google Talk, AIM, and
Google is already working to integrate Google Talk with AIM: Time Warner's AOL and Google to Expand Strategic Alliance . AIM and
From Google's blog:
Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors' email, IM, and web-based services?
I too am afraid that Microsoft will attempt to quash any attempts to provide inter operability between different IM providers and will likely succeed since it will control the lion's share of IM accounts. Although Google has the lion's share of the search market, they at least provide or try to provide inter operability with other companies and do not try to lock competitors out of a particular business model.
The goggles, they do NOTHING!
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
It's a thousand times easier to switch search engines than it is to switch OSs. Google grew very quickly (from nothing) BECAUSE it's such a fungible product and they were so much better. A better search engine could just as easily grab that share away again. (You can't argue 'but, but, value of Google brand' either because Google's brand only became valuable after their search engine became popular, people don't get locked into "brands". And in any case, MS and Yahoo both have well-known brands.)
In any case, Google's product isn't a search engine, it's online advertising. And also, in any case, it is pretty much hard to argue that Google gained their search monopoly by making the best mousetrap, and that Microsoft gained their Windows monopoly by strategy, lock-in, user ignorance and marketing. It doesn't invalidate anything, wtf!??!
MS woke up late to the internet. Once they woke up, their attempts at gaining a foothold were more or less unsuccessful.
Indeed. However this move is possibly their most bone-headed reaction yet. I have no doubt it's straight from the brain of Steve I'm going to fucking kill Google Ballmer. Acquiring Yahoo is another attempt to tame the internet and tie it to Windows services, and it will fail as dismally as the last few attempts, because the internet (and Yahoo) is the antithesis of Microsoft.
Users on the web don't like being 'monetized' unless there's something in it for them, and they'll resist attempts by MS to change that balance of power. Those attempts by MS to exploit users are inevitable because it's just not in Ballmer's (or Microsoft's) DNA to let users get something for nothing.
For Microsoft as a company, swallowing Yahoo whole is going to create many more problems than it solves. It will drive the good engineers to Google (very few of Yahoo's people could thrive under the entirely different MS culture), it'll give Microsoft lots of new properties which directly compete with their own offerings, it'll make all the MS Live employees very nervous and trigger more internal turf wars, and finally, it will land MS with servicing lots of disgruntled users on services like Flickr who will desert in droves at the first attempt to corral them into an MS only internet (as MS is prone to do - see ActiveX, IE, Silverlight, etc). Their business model (lock in the users and milk them for profits) isn't under threat, it's past its sell by date; you can't continually abuse your users forever and expect them never to walk away, particularly not if you're trying to operate as a web services company, and I have my doubts that Ballmer et al will ever learn this lesson. They've done too well in the past by applying it to abandon it now.
Still, if you don't work at Yahoo, and you're not keen on Microsoft dominating yet another market, this foolish move is heartening news. Google must be celebrating the beginning of the end of the dark ages of the internet. This will tie up MS for years.