Remember the beginning of this year when Microsoft were offering a fortune but Yahoo! weren’t selling? How about when Google stood up for poor little Yahoo! and said that Microsoft weren’t really playing nicely?
Well, now Google is going to really help Yahoo! out by paying them to serve up their adverts. Yesterday it was announced that Yahoo! is going to use Google for search and contextual advertising. This is newsworthy because for many it signals the beginning of the end for Yahoo!s search marketing.
For me its newsworthy because of the way people talk about these internet giants. Lets not kid ourselves here, Yahoo! is a MASSIVE company, they employ around 14,000 people and posted a net income of $660 USD million in 2007- they can look after themselves thank-you-very-much.
Similarly, it appears to be OK for Google to buy-in to Yahoo! but not for Microsoft. Google is becoming the internet- that’s presumably what they want, and it’ll probably happen one day, so it is strange that they’re seen as a "nicer" option than Microsoft.
Once upon a time Google used to be anti-establishment, but times have changed, and now Google is the establishment- they are the benchmark, the bottleneck and the over-protective, slightly creepy nanny. In many ways Google and Microsoft have the most synergy (aaaargh I used the ‘s’ word) so my rather bizarre prediction is that when Google has finally eaten all its internet siblings it will marry Microsoft, safe in the knowledge that there’ll be no-one left to disapprove.
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