Let's be serious. The Justice Dept.,ICC and SEC haven't really given anti-trust a whole lot of credence for over 20 years. Horizontal mergers, collusion, price-fixing, etc. have been rampant and are a large portion of the cause of the state of American business affairs. MS is a long-standing government contractor so a ruling in their favor would come as no surprise to me. This is the sort of practice that MS has engaged in for years....why would they stop now?

The other element of a monopoly that you are ignoring is the vertical aspect: control of one part of a value chain allows control of the entire value chain, even though there is no real logical connection. MS uses a dominant position in both operating systems and office application software to charge exorbitant fees for both.

Judge Jackson was absolutely correct to impose a required separation of the two businesses, unfortuantely $50 billion dollars will buy whatever "justice" you want.

If these were fully separated, there would be Office for Linux -- probably priced at well under $100 per seat in quantity -- and fully documented WinOS API calls for application vendors to compete.

The most likely scenario is that MS will create an advertising fee structure that some advertisers would receive preferred treatment in a Yahoo search results list, if the advertiser would include a special code to avoid appearing in Google results.

If you take a mediocre search engine (Yahoo) and add a less-than-mediocre search engine (currently owned by MS) it doesn't add up to a great search engine (Google). MS already owns a search engine and all their $ haven't made it #1. Other than keeping Yahoo where they are in the market, I don't see the MS $ doing much.

Combining Yahoo + Microsoft would create a near monopoly on internet portals and email. I find it strange that this is not mentioned more.

Ballmer makes all his internet properties a showcase for Microsoft's Internet products. So he has to go into Yahoo and slaughter every single product they are now selling. Yahoo's employees will have no choice but to quit because he'll be forcing them to change everything to Windows, and Unix-based people will quit and seek employment elsewhere before doing something silly like that. Most of them are probably not even qualified to continue with their jobs once everything goes Windows. I'd call that cruel and unusual punishment.

From the point of view of customers, who have overwhelmingly selected Yahoo's offerings over Microsoft's, I see this as a catastrophe. The Flickr users who have mounted protest signs are on the right track. If we're lucky, Steve Ballmer will allow Caterina Fake et al to do a leveraged buyout of the place. But i think Ballmer's too sadistic to do the right thing.

I don't even understand how this benefits Ballmer because I expect the transition to be extremely difficult for everyone involved, particularly with Yahoo gutted of pretty much everyone who knows the systems as they were at the time of the takeover. He will have spent $45 billion plus for an empty shell with the remaining employees the bottom of the barrel time-servers and the audience dwindling over to Google, Facebook and whatever else is out there.

Are there antitrust considerations in buying a company to destroy it, its products and culture wholesale? I don't work for Yahoo, and I'm glad I don't, but I hate Steve Ballmer for doing this. It may feed his ego but it's awful for Yahoo, Yahoo's customers and the Internet as a whole.

D

D, BillMc, et all......

The anti-trust (Serman Act, et all) considerations will most likely end up non sequitr. MS has bought companies (and tried to buy others) solely to "embrace, extend, extinguish". Why not now?

The employees who aren't "Vista Capable" will go the way of NT4.0 and the customeers will have to adapt and overcome. It will be the beginning of a new and improved .NET Web2.0 experience that you will all enjoy.....or else.

MS should not be allowed to buy Yahoo without first spinning off Zimbra. Zimbra was purchased by Yahoo for $350M last October. It is the only viable competition to MS Exchange and is used by 10s of millions of people worldwide in both its paid and open source versions. Microsoft will destroy Zimbra by letting it die on the vine. This is clearly anti-competitive and should not be allowed.

Antitrust law has less to do with monopolies, than with competition. Regulators don't like a situation where three competitors suddenly become two competitors, where prices can rise from lack of competition.

Remember, the Sherman Act has two parts:
1) monopolization
2) restraint of trade

Don't agree: "it has the ability to spend and spend to trump the existing competitors."--There is abviously a limit, I have heard that Microsoft has to take someone's help (or loan) to buy even Yahoo.

Dont' agree: "Google's clearly got a dominant position. They've got about 75 percent of paid search worldwide." "---Who has stopped anyone from moving ahead from google. If you have a ability go ahead. Nobody has stopped anyone from taking no.1 position. THiS MEANS THAT NOBODY IS SUFFICIENTLY ENABLE TO SUCCEED.

strongly agree: But I come back to Google.

Very true... to those who understand Sherman a bit. Restraint of competition has been a problem in many sectors, but MS has gotten away with destroying competing technologies that they were unable/unwilling to originate. Hopefully, this will be a litmus test of the legal system. If the legal/regulatory system acts as an honest broker this deal won't go through. If it does go through.....we all better brush up on our Visual Studio operations and prepare for at least another decade of poor security built-in to most of what we do.

Oh my. Put my house back down on the ground.

Let us all bow our heads for a moment and pray that Yahoo is effective in resisting the Borg, especially since they seem so inclined.

Now for those of you who are new to the the Borg's tactics, research the creation of Internet Explorer when it came miraculously fast onto the scene and was indistinguishable from Netscape except for the look of the spinning Logo.

Jump forward a smidgen in time to v4 when it was starting to be an indispensable (or at least, not a disconnectable) part of Windows. Then v5, v6, and now v7 actually stealing ideas (tabbed browsing) directly from the only visible competitor (firefox).

And the suits? "MUST RUN IE... MUST RUN IE..."

So with all the pressure to jump into SOA (really an acronym for Surrender Open Applications!), how can you not see yourself digging through the registry to change the magic byte that allows you to access Google instead of Yahoo in less than two years?

"Resistance is futile."