I guess by now everyone has heard about fridays offer from Microsoft to buy Yahoo for $45 billion. Up to now, all I read online were the mere announcements of the proposal, this article by the iht.com and this one in wired provide more detailed analyses of possible consequences.
Personally I'm not sure if this deal, if it goes through as planned, is going to push microsoft into a better position on its online activities competing against google. In terms of market share (in areas where google is actually making money), yahoo is nowhere near its competitor and microsoft doesn't really have anything successful to add to that.

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