Interweb Overlords Of The Near Future

With the apparent hostile takeover of Yahoo! well underway, Microsoft has launched itself in attack dog mode, which is a change of pace from its normal "don't hit me with a monopoly suit" mode. If you haven't been reading or watching any news lately, wake up and smell the coffee. The big three, Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft are bitch slapping each other all around town with threats and absurd amounts of money offers for takeovers, all to be the dominant player on the block.

While I don't believe Microsoft will become more powerful then Google if they acquire Yahoo!, it will certainly put a dent in gap between Microsoft and Google. Livesearch, which is Microsoft's search utility, is a shamble of a search engine in comparison to Google. Yahoo! has been listed in the number two slot for a long while, but have been slipping due to internal issues with the corporation as a whole. By combining Livesearch with Yahoo! there should be some considerable growth that could be made.

One thing that you can take away from this ongoing saga of a hostile (but not really) take over is that if you take an unexpected action, that is a bit controversial, and throw some money on the fire you'll get a crap load of publicity. Granted its two of the biggest players in the game, the principles apply to any marketing campaign. Taking an issue that people care quite a bit about and market your wares in a controversial way such as a hostile take over for example will usually get some outspoken people to raise up and throw down some serious publicity.

On the well known statement that any publicity is a good publicity, if you want to get a product of your own out on the internet and in the public eye you could try something that would gain the ire of internet users, such as the Microsoft take over of Yahoo! might seriously hinder the openness and freedom of information that you find on the internet today. Considering a majority of the internet would then be indexed and search results would be spun based on the end company's own wishes, we could be seeing a force fed diet of whatever the internet overlords wish us to.

Just a thought. Now back to eating lunch.