14 DAY TRIAL // In the eventuality that Microsoft and Yahoo will end up tying the knot on online search and advertising, the duo will have Google's blessing. Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt had nothing but the best of wishes for rivals from Redmond and Sunnyvale, at a Morgan Stanley technology conference in San Francisco. Of course, all the best was served with a side dish of irony, as Schmidt made sure to emphasize that such a union would only add yet another page to the history of restricting consumer choice. Of course, in 2008, Google itself attempted to become a pair with Yahoo via an agreement that was killed by antitrust concerns.
"Microsoft is working very hard to build a competitive search engine," Schmidt said according to Yahoo Tech, adding that a Microsoft and Yahoo marriage will be hard to happen. “I don't know if that scenario will occur. We did our best attempt at a deal with Yahoo!, and as you know we had to cancel it at the very last minute. So we wish them the best of luck. The problem has to do with Microsoft's ability to use its Windows monopoly to restrict consumer choice. That's not a new subject, it's been discussed at great length. So anything that Microsoft would do that would eliminate consumer choice with respect to search engines, Internet browsers, distribution, for which it was previously found guilty, are of concern and there's a history of that.”
In the first half of 2008 Microsoft attempted to buy Yahoo via an unsolicited initial offer of almost $45 billion, which ended up growing in the vicinity of $50 billion. Yahoo, with Jerry Yang at the helm, resisted the takeover, and by mid-2008 Microsoft had given up on the perspective of acquiring the no.2 company on the search engine market in the race to close the gap separating it from Google, although the software giant revealed that its main focus would be placed on growing search organically.
Schmidt referenced the preservation of competition on a fair basis as an argument for blessing the Microsoft and Yahoo pair. Still, even with Yahoo's new chief executive officer, Carol Bartz, a Microsoft deal doesn't seem like a sure thing, although Bartz noted that any discussions with the Redmond company would be kept private.
"We've been investing in search this last tumultuous year. We've actually improved the search experience,” Bartz explained. “Search data is extremely important and we would never debone the company of missing what our customers value by knowing what they're looking for. I'm not going to negotiate with my 50,000 favorite friends [Microsoft]. If we're going to negotiate it's as companies negotiate and that is privately. And if something happens you'll know it then, and until then there's no comment on it.”
But Microsoft is by no means waiting for Yahoo to say “I do.” The software giant has already debuted the internal testing process of codename Kumo, a service reported to be the Live Search killer. At the same time Microsoft is looking to rebrand Live Search to something a tad more user friendly.