Microsoft - Yahoo! - Google

I was thrilled to hear Microsoft is hoping to aquire Yahoo! I've been a fan of Yahoo! ever since I've been using the internet. I would love to know when I first created My Yahoo page. Recently I've also become a paying subscriber of Flickr which works really well in combination with Windows Live Photo Gallery.

So I was not dissappointed when I found out that Microsoft wasn't going to distribute the 44.6 billion dollars amongst its 79 000 employees ;-) I was really happy!

Then of course came the analysis of the deal. Although the usual suspects delivered on the expectation and painted a gloomy picture, I read mostly positive reactions.

The one critical reaction that was expected but I disliked most was that of David Drummond (SVP Google). Of course Google crossing their fingers that somewhere this deal will be blocked. But using a blog for this and standing up as the defender of the free web is completely overdoing it in my opinion. In such cases, I prefer senior execs not to blog at all.

It's clear that the online ad market Google dominates, is one of scale. For sure, they wish they had many smaller competitors but is that what's really best for competition in this space? I'll leave to the real industry watchers to fight it out but I found the blog post way too cheesy. A press release would have been just right. Just like Microsoft's General Councel Brad Smith did.

In the meantime I love to see the speculation on a name change in case the deal goes through. Although I don't expect a name change, I would love to see the Yahoo! brand stay alive for all internet services and then why not a change to ...