Shoe on the other foot ?
Oh dear my heart bleeds for poor old M$, don't like it do they when Microshafting happens to them :)
Microsoft kicked off a campaign on Friday against the advertising collaboration deal struck between Google and Yahoo!, Reuters reports. Quoting two sources familiar with the matter, the news agency said that just one day after Google agreed to sell ads on Yahoo!’s website Microsoft contacted Washington-based advocacy groups …
Key points:
"limit choices"
“destroy a competitive alternative"
"what amounts to a price-fixing agreement"
"hamstring competition"
"consolidate more than 90 per cent of the [...] market"
These are all mainstays of Micro$not's business practices, and are not to be performed by anyone else.
I'd rather see Google and Yahoo! merging, than an M$ takeover. In fact, Google-Yahoo are much more compatible in technology base and mindsets than M$-Yahoo.
All the Google and Yahoo stuff for mobile phones, for example, will run seamlessly with my Blackberry, while the MS stuff (MSN Spaces, specifically) will rebuff me with "OS not compatible" crap. As long as Microsoft doesn't have a big share into the web, you can guarantee that most websites can run on other browsers than IE. I'm pretty sure that if MS takes over Yahoo! they'd use it to push their god-awful Silverlight stuff, that only runs in Windows/IE.
Cry all you want, Ballmer. We don't care anyway.
What could be funnier than Microsoft fussing about the evils of monopolistic practices?
What would be really interesting is to have MS write up a set of remedies that would maintain innovation, competition, and consumer choice in the Googahoo monopoly, but with the (secret) caveat that MS would have to abide by the same remedies, only substituting Windows and Office for Google and Yahoo.
>>"Our position has been clear since April that any deal between these two companies will increase prices for advertisers and start to consolidate more than 90 per cent of the search advertising market in Google's hands," he said.
90% share? That would be terrible. Of course 90% share in the OS market is OK, just not in search apparently.
ok, so I've finally come to terms with leccy, mobe, and lappy, but please ban the following from commentspace:
M$, Micro$oft, MicroShit, Micro$hit, MicroShaft, Micro$haft, Crapple, CrapOS, Crapintosh, WinBlows, Slowlaris, Screwgle, Farceberk, BSd, hpox, lunix, ReiserFS, and any other shitty non-pun?
And for those who think that this kind of carry on is funny/insightful/useful, can they please just fuck off to appleinsider, zdnet or slashdot?
Microsoft and Yahoo joining forces could have actually created competition for Google.
Google is far and away the biggest search engine around, and thus them teaming up with their competition IS anti-competitive.
Competition always breeds innovation, once you get a monopoly, you get Lazy (Microsoft being a good example), whats to stop Google getting the same?