Well it has dragged on for month but finally Microsoft backed out of the deal. As always money was the problem as Yahoo wanted to much and Microsoft offered to little. Long term Microsoft has to reinvent itself in the search engine market and that goes double for yahoo. If a user wishes to ad a url to Google you only have to got to google.com/adurl and you can submit, have you recently tried to submit a site to yahoo or msn, its a joke. MSN has always looked rather like a myspace or social networking to attract serious internet users and yahoo tries to much to be a mega directory rather than a search engine. They both need to get with the program and readdress who their target audience is as its only then that the advertisers will spend there cash with both organizations.

If Microsoft had bought yahoo, would the deal have gone through with monopolies and merges? And would the combined operation offer a real alternative to Google? Only another viral search engine that comes out of the blue will ever give competition the Google, just like Google did when yahoo was the number one mainstream search engine. Everyone remembers big blue IBM and then pow, DELL appears and that was really the end of that. Innovation and a fresh approach will always determine the winner in these battles. Its us the consumer that are judges in who will finally prevail long term,  as we are not longer consumer fodder anymore, but technology savvy users that know what works and what will not.