Microsoft Yahoo, how does it sound?

Today may become one of those days to make history. Business and Internet history.

Microsoft and Yahoo just announced that they will unite forces to face the giant of search engines, Google.

A successful completion of the talks marked the end of a year and a half of meetings, talks, gossips, influence and behind-the-scene calls. It all began with an unsolicited full takeover bid proposed by MS that rocked the internet world. From the summer of 2008 on, the software giant changed its approach and started pushing for a looser alliance - a combination of the search technology and search advertising systems of the two companies - to have better chance to catch up with Google.

According to Richard Waters and Joseph Menn from ft.com "The talks picked up steam late last week after the two sides reached the outlines of a deal in which Yahoo would not receive any upfront payment, as Microsoft had initially offered in the middle of last year, but the two sides would divide future search advertising revenues."

Yahoo would increase its cashflow at a time of declining revenue in its search business, for one. The other aspect: BING showed some major improvement compared to old MS search products, and this alliance would not damage Yahoo's image in setting up partnership with an inferior product than his own.

It is known that both Yahoo and Microsoft have failed to dent Google’s lead in the global search market in the past years.

Comscore, the online measurement group, said that Google increased its share of global web searches from 60 per cent last August to 69 per cent in May 2009, while Yahoo’s share fell from 11 per cent to 9 per cent in the same period. Microsoft, which launched Bing in June, has remained stable at around 3 per cent this year, lagging China’s Baidu with 9 per cent share of queries in May.

Even a combination of Microsoft and Yahoo’s search businesses would fail to overtake Google. According to Nielsen, the audience research group, Bing had 41m unique users in the US in June, compared with Yahoo’s 67m and Google’s 136m. But those are raw figures, A+B result that have little foreseeing basis for future developments of the all-new alliance, that you can read the terms at Microsoft-Yahoo press release.

As things take another dimension and speed in the internet, who knows where they will be in ten years' time, when the contract of exploitation by MS is due?

History will tell!

Sources: MS, Yahoo, financial times, comscore, choice value innovation

How Rich are we?

There are several well known magazines and sites throughout the web to list the top 100, top 500 great fortunes of the planet.
These folks have dreamlike lives, where money does not count much. It is a matter of what they want, not what they can afford.

Considering that we are 7billion on sharing Gaia, have you ever thought where are you placed on an hypothetical world wealth list ?
These guys have an estimate of where you would be placed.
Type in your annual income (salary+other revenues included) and it will give you your rank among all inhabitants of the globe.
You, as I, might be surprised of our placement. We are INDEED fortunate ones if we look at the percentage that we might come to be placed at.

It sure put us to think about taxation of great fortunes, sparing with the less fortunets ones, human greed and social programs in poor areas of the world.
I have already heard a theory that if today all the world's wealth were shared equally among everyone, in 30 years' time it would come back to the same hands as it is today, due to one's capacity, competence, intelligence, business aggressiveness, or simply because some of us are gifted and take the most out of it.

But the issue here points to another facet of the question, and you may name it as you wish: to give a hand, to share, charity, subvention....
When we aid, we feel better. When we share we lift our spirits, when we lead the way in a new model of growth, we warm hearts and we make a difference!

By simply HELPING OUT the ones in the need on our way to wealthiness, we will sure put a smile on someone's face along our path. We will give a future to the hopeless, or a different life perspective to numberless children.

Our actions of sharing and the application of new models of sustainable growth may not make history books, but at least after we are gone we will be remembered by some, perhaps, a little longer.

Credits with a bow of hat to Make wealth history for the inspirational tip for this article.