I guess $80 billion isn’t enough. This would be crazy if it ever happened. A clear squareoff then between Microsoft-Yahoo and Google.

I hope it doesn’t happen because I really like Yahoo. They acquired some breakthrough companies like flickr and del.icio.us while Google bough up a few noteable flops…

• Urchin Software which later became Google Analytics which had to shut down to new users not long after they released because they couldn’t scale (as I experienced).
• Dodgeball which I presume no one uses since I use it only 2-3 times a week and am consistenly among the top 15 users in Seattle (and I know 7-8 of the other top users).
• Picassa which I installed but don’t use and have no idea how it will make them any money.
• Deja which was a sweet acquisition in theory because it brought us Google Groups but ended up being painful because people couldn’t actually post to newsgroups for years after the acquisition (which they could do with the original Deja, pre-acquisition).
• Google has also built some lame things. Orkut never really caught on compared to Friendster, MySpace, FaceBook, LinkedIn and all the others. Their RSS reader has some cool features, but is ugly. GMail is pretty cool but at the end of the day they’re way behind hotmail and yahoo mail in terms of users.

To Google’s credit, their acquisition of Pyra (which brought us Blogger) was probably pretty good. Where 2 Technologies, which helped give us Google Maps is awesome (“Double True!”). To the extent that Sprinks helped with AdSense that may have been a strong acquisition too.

But, I have lately felt that Yahoo! “gets it” a little better when it comes to acquisitions… possibly because the last two have been great companies. As long as they don’t screw it up they’re on the right track.