So we are all interested in hearing about what Yahoo is going to do with the $42 billion offer on the table. I think many are speculating that Yahoo will take the offer and call it a day. Will this be good for competition and the free market ? I think not. Why you may ask is because of the following,

1. We will in essence have only 2 choices for advertising Microsoft and Google.

2. Microsoft will definitely try to stomp out smaller competitors first using teh Yahoo platform

3. Users will at some point be migrated to a Microsoft standard and that will be a step back for opensource

4. Openess and Innovation go out of the window (and into MS Windows)

5. All of Yahoo’s smaller business units like Flickr will loose that look and feel and will become a profit tool that we don’t want.

All of this is very bad for startups even if they don’t see it now , they will see it later.

The counter aguement is that people will just migrate to other services and all startups to grow and compete including the ad companies. This is not an incorrect statement but the percentage that will migrate will be a small portion of users as most of us don’t want to go and recreate accounts and move tons of mail and messenger contacts to another servce.

 From the advertising side why would’nt Microsoft give the entire userbase deep discounts for a few months and essentially bring the samller competitors to their knees.

It is scary to think about it ,but this could be the reality.

Maybe Google to intervene with a bid as they don’t have a strong presence in many areas that Yahoo is king. Another way would be if Google bought shares in Yahoo more towards 40 percent region.

Well let us wait and see what the coming weeks will bring to the table. 

 

  

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