Filed under: Deals, Consumer experience, Competitive strategy, Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo! (YHOO)

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is hardly likely to benefit from a Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) buyout of Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO). Having a bigger competitor with a bigger piece of the search market hardly does it any good. The “merger” of the two companies also creates that largest display ad company in the world.

But, display advertising isn’t a fast-growing business. Google’s search operation is, and it will continue to have , more than 60% of the market in the US.

Perhaps because its share price is down so much, Google has begun kicking about the proposed marriage. According to Reuters, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, “We would hope that anything they did would be consistent with the openness of the Internet, but I doubt it would be.” The search company is probably trying to hint that Microsoft would “use” the new company to promote its software agenda to the detriment of consumers who simply want to use the web for information and entertainment.

It might be a reasonable argument to get regulators to look hard at the potential deal, but Microsoft isn’t that stupid. It is very likely to comprehend that pushing its products to users and hurting access to the normal experience of getting everything from sports scores to news about Madonna won’t fly.

Google can hardly talk. It pushes its Google Apps software, its e-mail and mapping products to people who come to the site to use its search features. None of the huge world wide web sites is “pure”. They do have to make money.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 11:12 am and is filed under Stocks News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.