Microsoft attempts to buy Yahoo! and Google reacts

[matgb]

Official Google Blog: Yahoo! and the future of the Internet:

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

Interesting times it seems. Can that be read as anything other than "gloves off, come on then"?

Comments

[paulatpingu.livejournal.com]

But advertising revenue is down at the minute, and will be one of the first things to go should we fall into recession (cf Google's lower than expected profits released a day or two ago.) Also, there's a level of saturation online ad-wise that means that as people get more fed up of adverts and more tech-savvy, those adverts will get blocked and ignored a whole lot more. Not that advertising companies won't come up with other ways of getting their message across, but a business that focuses solely on making money through having ad space might start to feel the pinch.

Frankly, we're still not in a position where a economy 2.0 non-bricks and mortar company can ever be considered 'not-doomed'. MS at least has the advantage that it has physical product that still has massive monopoly on the market. What we haven't seen in the last 25 years is a viable challenger to MS software dominance (And that's from a committed Linux user), whereas Google was virtually unheard of ten years ago and may well be unheard of again in another ten years.

Don't expect MS to die anytime soon - they're still here after the paradigm shift that was the boom of home computing, so they've already shown they can adapt to a new model of working. Maybe we don't even know what the next one is, but the biggest company on the planet isn't going to disappear overnight regardless what happens.

[matgb]

On the ad front—I think that's why they're pushing so heavily into SAS with Docs, domain hosting, etc. They have the server capacity and the backups to pretty much guarantee 100% uptime. If I were setting up a small business now, I'd consider hosted Docs and Gmail, both of which you can pay for a version that's got your branding on. Theyr'e not there yet for a company the size of yours to consider, but in a few years? Maybe.

And I'm really hopefull that things like the EEE will help Linux take off (finally), and a fair few Vendors are seeing where the market is moving, especially with the Vista mess.

MS'll still be about, but dominant market leader? Possibly.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, the domain stuff is great - I've got it for ducker.org.uk and the email is 100% reliable.

Oh, and since getting an Eee and discovering that Linux is now so usable I've installed a VM onto a USB key with Ubuntu on it, set up Firefox, and now have the environment I want wherever I go!

[matgb]

This is because you are Teh Ubergeek.

I might have to give both a go at somepoint I guess, I tried Ubuntu at either 5.* or 6.*, but messed up the install and lost a partition, as my desktop is now unused it's probably time to back everything up and go again...

[andrewducker]

So not an ubergeek. I know people that actually _like_ Linux. I was only doing it to avoid paying license costs for Windows :->

And I didn't install it onto a partition on my PC. In fact I didn't install it at all. I went to Moka5.com, installed their software, said "A Ubuntu VM please" and 20 minutes later was booted to a desktop. No hassle required :->