Microsoft + Yahoo > Google ?

The big news of the morning is that Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo for 44.6 billion dollars. WOW. That's a lot of money and it seems like too good a deal for Yahoo to pass up.

If these two giants merge, can they create enough synergy to challenge the king of the internet, Google? Yes, they can.

It's no secret that these once traditional search engine companies are moving beyond search. This battle is about advertising, e-mail, social networks, RSS, webware, and much much more.

Google has stomped all over them. With an arsenal of services such as search, blogger, google docs, google calendar, gmail, google reader, and YouTube, Google is the current leader in the web 2.0 world (And a big lead they have I might add).

By merging, these two companies can create synergy by combining their strengths. Think about it...

1. Yahoo Mail is much better and popular than gmail.
2. Microsoft Office (while not yet online) is much better than Google Docs.
3. Flickr has a much larger active user base than Picasa.
4. Microsoft has a formidable advertising base to compete against Google Ad Words.
5. The "Yahoo" brand is very well known.

Mergers are never a magical solution... But Google is so far ahead of the pack, merging seems like a good idea to me.