I believe that the combination of both the companies will deliver superior values of services to the bloggers as it has compete Google. They may come up with attractive Advertising publisher network so, the blogger is no more solely dependent on Google Adsense for his income.

Let us hope that it provides better choice and innovation for us and become a big success!

Parul Bindra http://www.bhopu.com- Web 2.0 blogs

If MS can really step back and truly give the enlightened technologists at Yahoo a fair hearing for all the great work that has gone unnoticed by their current employer (Yahoo), and bring a modicum of business and integration rigor to the combined properties, then maybe there can be good from the buyout.

That sentence was bad. But you get it, it’s late.

Say goodbye to Flickr Pro. Say hello to Flickr Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise and Ultimate. Pricing is TBD ;)

But I’ll admit, Om, I think you’re running away from the core issue here. Microsoft is acquiring yahoo for the potential search combination and almost more importantly for the traffic aggregation benefit. The real underlying benefit is to build a much greater platform for advertisers. Assuming they can build an integrated advertising platform + publisher network (a la aQuantive), which is a big assumption, the benefit to fold brands into the same umbrella just doesn’t matter. Now the MSN brand may go, only because Microsoft was creating confusion on its own long before Yahoo entered the picture (what with Windows Live, Office Live and MSN). But other than that, there’s not tangible reason by Microsoft needs to integrate the user experiences other than for the sole reason of being able to offer an integrated publishing experience to advertisers across MSFT / YHOO joint properties.

The focus here is to give advertisers a choice: spend on paid search or display dollars or some combination of both.

For paid search, let’s take it to google, but maybe for certain audiences, MicroHoo makes sense.

For display ads.. Goog definitely doesn’t make sense. Let’s go with MicroHoo.

If I have to decide between using paid search or display, well.. there’s an argument to be made for going with display on joint MSFT / YHOO properties vs going with paid Goog just because of the scale…. when there wasn’t even a question of which way I would go if MSFT & YHOO were separate…

This isn’t about the consumers.. it’s about the sheer scale of numbers for advertisers..

Google is #1.

Purely from an employee perspective, both companies have a long way to go before they can take on the might of Google.

How can a combined company get such allegiance from employees that will take the battle to Google.

This is the key question – ultimately it will be the employees that will execute and implement a war stategy. Are they up for a fight?