If Microsoft buys Yahoo! to try and muscle its way on-line, why should Google even care, let alone be worried about it? Reportedly, the search-engine firm has been maneuvering behind the scenes to thwart the deal, lobbying for antitrust scrutiny and chatting up Yahoo's CEO about some joint projects. But this simply doesn't add up for a company as aggressive and imaginative as Google. More likely is that they are secretly thrilled that their nastiest potential competitor is about to pour $44.6 billion dollars down a virtual rat hole. After all, when has Microsoft ever added value to an acquisition, especially one so beleaguered as Yahoo!? Microsoft has been behind the curve in nearly every big acquisition it has made, paying through-the-nose for a catch-up strategy that has come to define, as well as constrain, its global ambitions. To take one particularly important example, when Google bought DoubleClick last April for $3.1 billion, buttressing its digital marketing prowess, Microsoft paid twice as much a month later for a firm with similar capabilities, aQuantive. (Click on image to enlarge) So what, for $44.6 billion, is the irresistible appeal of Yahoo!? The company's core business has been declining for two years, and Google has been eating its lunch. Jim Cramer called the deal a master stroke, but he is living in the past if he thinks paying that kind of money for mere market share will allow a geriatric case like Microsoft to close the huge gap with Google in online marketing. Innovation is what gets investors' juices flowing these days, not acquisition-driven growth, and the ever-clueless Microsoft could not innovate its way out of a soggy paper bag. Micro-Minestrone This is after all a company whose idea of 'innovation' is Windows Vista, yet another gratuitously enhanced retread of a PC operating
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