Google says Microsoft’s Yahoo buy might hurt Internet: Reuters

http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/080317/google_microsoft.html

macsmiley:

I tend to agree. Just think of how Microsoft astroturfed the Zune. Then those writers who sought to expose this were banned from Digg.com, whose major sponsor was… you guessed it… Microsoft. I’m sure Google is talking out of some self-interest, of course, but Microsoft has a black history with too much blood on its hands already.

Will regulators have the backbone to stand up against this? We shall see.

I have to disagree with this whole line of thinking. In the old days (aka when I was a Stormtrooper in the service of BillG’s evil empire) I would have believed it. Microsoft was still small enough to be focused, rich enough to be powerful, and agressive enough to be evil. Now it’s just a big bureacracy that is too incompetent to compete across the breadth of the markets it is in. The phalanxes of Stormtroopers have been disbanded. If it gets Yahoo it will have a short term impact as it consolidates power but in the long term Microsoft will just turn Yahoo+MSN into the Vista of the online world.

Are you really afraid of that?