Google Responds: There Can Be Only One

Leave it to Google to post their response to Microsoft's offer to buy Yahoo on Super Bowl Sunday; were they hoping that the mainstream press would let it go by or were they hoping to detract from even that holiest of American holidays?

Posted today at 11:45 Google Time by David Drummond, Google Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer, the entry paints Google as the little guy and Microsoft as the big baddy trying to take over the world. With the opening sentence of his second paragraph, “So Microsoft's hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions,” Drummond essentially declares war on Microhoo or Yahoosoft or my personal favorite as suggested by the folks at Slashdot, Sin and Yang.

The entry demonstrates that Google has left their “Don't be evil” mantra in the dust. The real issue at hand here is that Google feels there can be only one major player in the Internet space, and that's Google. Yahoo has been struggling for some time now, and Microsoft has never been much of a player in the web space, and is losing ground even with their browser, losing 0.9 percent market share in Europe in December of last year alone. For either company to hope to compete with Google, they are going to have to do something drastic.

Drummond refers to the bid as a “hostile bid,” but a 62% increase over the previous day's closing price isn't exactly hostile. The definition of a hostile bid involves making a public bid without contacting the board of the company beforehand, which, to my understanding, isn't how it happened. Google is going out here on the offensive, painting the proposed buyout as the epitome of evil.

In reality, none of the companies involved comes out looking good. Yahoo just laid off 1000 employees, and has consistently failed to “bring back the yodel.” Microsoft has years of bad press, potentially illegal business moves to better position their products, and a lack of real understanding of how to leverage the Web to their advantage. Google? Google appears to be trying to fill Microsoft's 1980s shoes, either buying or running over any potential competition. Did Drummond really claim that Microsoft and Yahoo have “the two most heavily trafficked portals on the Internet?” When Google alone has over 50% of the market share for search?

What we are actually watching here is a struggle between two behemoths to see who will emerge victorious and monopolize everything from our desktops to the Web. And according to Google, there can be only one.

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