Eric Schmidt was doing his level best late last week not to gloat. With Microsoft dropping its attempted takeover of Yahoo, the Google chief executive had just seen his arch-rival abandon its most direct attack yet on Google’s growing dominance of online search and advertising.
“I’m happy to be crowned winner,” Mr Schmidt said, before quickly adding: “But as we’ve learned in the election cycle, it goes back and forth.”
The political analogy may have been ill-judged. Like Hillary Clinton after last week’s primary results, Microsoft has never looked more on the defensive. For a company that has always scorned the idea of big mergers in the past, the pursuit of Yahoo was the clearest admission yet that the software company was running out of options as it tried to counter the rise of Google.
“The failure of the Microsoft/Yahoo merger eliminates the biggest short-term threat” to Google’s unrivalled position on the web, says David Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School. For now, its momentum “seems unstoppable”. Michael Cusumano, a management professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describes Google’s now-unchallenged dominance even more bluntly: “They’re sitting on a goldmine.”
As much as I dislike monopolies, which Google is fastly becoming, I have to admit that Google is by far the best search engine out there. I try others from time to time, but I have yet to find one that is even as remotely as accurate in finding the information I am looking for. 3/4’s of the stuff I search for on the other search engines are advertisements or just plain not relevant to my search.