The War is over – Microsoft lost

It looks like a second web war in Internet since the Internet hype of 2000 is raging. Companies are being acquired and the big shots are lurking at each other: eBay and Skype; MSN and AOL as well as Sun and Google. But this week the newsletter PaidContent of Rafat Ali pointed to a report, that blandly stated, that MSN has lost the Web war.

It looks like the report says, while you were sleeping the Web war was ranging, but is over now. And the author Henri Blodget does not just make statements he really put figures to it. His oneliner is: The War is over – Microsoft lost.
“There will be no great war between Microsoft and Google/Yahoo, because despite Microsoft’s vast resources, Google/Yahoo! have already left MSN far behind. There will be skirmishes, of course, but these will be irrelevant. Microsoft is as far behind in the web business as it was when it launched its online effort ten years ago, and short of disastrous mistakes by Google and Yahoo!, nothing Microsoft does on its own is likely to change that. Microsoft’s best chance to make MSN the industry leader is to spin it off, most likely in a merger with AOL. This won’t guarantee success—the combined entity would still be in third place—but it would create a company far stronger than either AOL or MSN on its own.”