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Microsoft: Google’s too big. Google: Microsoft’s too big
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
Speaking to Wall Street analysts on Monday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said his surprise $45 billion bid to buy Yahoo would only be good for competition, given Google’s dominance of the search engine business.
“We think this enhances competition,” Ballmer said in New York, according to the Associated Press.”Anything else would be less good from that perspective.”
Wait a minute. Microsoft. Isn’t that the tech industry’s 8-million pound gorilla that has become a poster company for anti-trust problems in recent years?
Exactly, says Google in its only public response so far to Microsoft’s proposed takeover. In Google’s official company blog, chief legal officer David Drummond went so far as to suggest that Microsoft could wreck the whole premise of the Internet if the deal goes through. Google, Drummond goes on to say, is willing to help Yahoo fight off Microsoft any way it can.
“Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC?” Drummond wrote over the weekend “While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies — and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.”
At Yahoo, meanwhile, CEO Jerry Yang says he’s not turning anybody away just yet. In a note to employees, published by the San Jose Mercury News, Yang said merging with Microsoft is only “one of many options that we’re evaluating” to make things better at the pioneering but struggling Internet company.
Stay tuned on this one.
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