Microsoft and Yahoo merge??

When I read that Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo for 44.6 USD billions, I just said WOW!!. I don't think that Yahoo is worth that, especially now that its shares are down and they could not make a real competence to Google last year (2007), the company is clear losing territory on the Web arena, while Google is still growing and making a lot of money. For me is obvious that Microsoft has realized that there is some king of Googlelization going on, that's a threat for them, but the point is that Google has figure out long time ago (maybe since its beginnings) that software has become a service and should be free in some cases. This paradigm works complete different because the product must be on the Web, friendly and very useful, it must give value to the users' information and those things has been Google's goals. Another threat for Microsoft, Yahoo and also Google are the vertical search engines that are going to be more popular, those engines will have more web intelligence (Web 3.0) algorithms, so the user experience will be complete different, I mean the websites are going to be more intelligence and the merge between the Web and the virtual worlds will definitely change the way we perceive the Internet. About Microsoft and Yahoo they will have to work together in putting the Office suite online, that's basically the main product of Microsoft and Google is developing that, actually they have already a suite online, on the other hand Yahoo has Flickr that has many users and has become an example of how users interact with the applications and also has a huge image database, the challenge that both companies have are enormous, they must eat up more slices from the advertising huge cake and put more software as services, they might have to re-design their business model.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7222114.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7222199.stm
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/01/technology/
01cnd-subyahoo.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin