Filed under: Deals, Competitive strategy, Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo! (YHOO), Employees

With the announcement of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT)’s $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO), the real courting process is about to begin.

As I predicted back in July 2007, this “affair” had to happen if Microsoft was ever going to be serious in challenging Google (NASDAQ: GOOG)’s reign in the lucrative search engine world. Looking at October 2007 data from comScore — the independent scorekeeper in the search world — Google was actually widening its dominance. Explain please!

There were 55.3 billion search queries worldwide during the month of October. Google handled 42.4 billion of these queries, while 2.1 billion were directed to Microsoft and Yahoo! handled 10.8 billion — or a total of one-quarter of Google searches. Worldwide growth was 56% year-over-year for the industry, while Google’s annual growth alone was 81%. The message: Google was taking market share at the expense of Microsoft and Yahoo!. Coupled with its recent disappointing guidance for 2008, Yahoo! had no choice but to hook up with Microsoft, and the opportunity for Microsoft was now. That’s all well and good, but now what happens?

Continue reading Microsoft-Yahoo: What happens now?

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This entry was posted on Saturday, February 2nd, 2008 at 8:57 pm and is filed under Stocks Money News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.