In April 2008, Microsoft and Yahoo! appeared ready to sign a deal to combine the two companies. Microsoft would buy Yahoo! shares for a little over $30 apiece. But as often happens at these high levels, Yahoo! was stolen away by another suitor, Microsoft’s arch-nemesis, Google. As opposed to an outright buyout, Google sought to sell its ads to Yahoo! such that Google ads would appear on Yahoo! search pages. This deal lead many, chief among them Microsoft, to question the legality of the deal because of its effect on competition and because Yahoo!-Google would control 90% of the search engine market.
This, of course, is not the first time that massive tech companies have been embroiled in battles over antitrust violations. Who can forget Microsoft’s epic battle against the United States government in the late 1990’s over Microsoft’s coupling of its operating system Windows and its web browser Internet Explorer? However, there are great differences between Microsoft’s anti-competitive measures and those that are alleged against Google.
First and foremost, Microsoft’s products were geared only to the consumer. Whether it was a business, an institution or an individual, Windows and Internet Explorer are products which generally have one end user. Google and Yahoo!, on the other hand, are companies engaged in selling advertisements. This means that the two companies have two constituencies, those who use the search engines themselves and those who want their ads displayed by the search engines. The Yahoo!-Google deal will harm neither of these groups. People will have the option of using either search engine, and the price of ads will still be set by competitive bidding among advertisers. Yet, even beyond these technical considerations, there are more organic reasons why Google should be left alone by the Justice Department’s antitrust attorneys.
It seems like a cliché, but the Internet has changed the way we live. Massive amounts of information that would have taken lots of leg work to track down before the Web are now available at any computer terminal with an Internet connection. But, with such a huge pile of data from a myriad of sources, two obstacles arise: the ability to search the data and the compatibility of the data’s format. Google’s PageRank search algorithm is second to none – one need only look at the concern’s over Google’s market share to see how popular its engine has become.
Google’s greatest potential may be in breaking down the barriers of incompatible software and formatting. With its suite of Web applications like Gmail, Google Maps and Google Documents, Google is swiftly becoming a web-based quasi-operating system. While some may have Big Brother concerns over proposed applications like Google Health, the need and desire for such programs is evidenced by how the pilot Google Health program was “quickly oversubscribed.” Apart from multiple applications, Google has now begun moving across devices with its recently unveiled Android. It is easy to imagine that one day in the future, we will be able to buy a computer preloaded with a Google Applications Suite rather than the old stand-by from Microsoft.
Finally, isn’t this what we want? Don’t we want to be able to access our documents, our photos, our everything, from anywhere at any time? Google, despite being a market juggernaut, has continued to innovate, but what’s more is that they have done it in the right way, by making things more accessible and more friendly across applications, not less. (How many e-mails have been sent asking for an attachment in .doc rather than .docx format?) Until another company comes along that can match both Google’s future-looking development philosophy and its benevolent motto, “Don’t be evil,” Google should be left to its own devices by the Justice Department.
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