Microsoft Takes Over Yahoo! Search In US, Canada

Yahoo! has completed the transition to Microsoft's search engine (now re-branded as Bing) in US and Canada. The search is limited only to English, it is expected that other languages may come at later time.
 
Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President, Online Services Division, Microsoft wrote on company blog, "This is a great milestone for Bing and Yahoo! and our customers, and we are happy to report the transition has gone smoothly and we feel great about the progress our search alliance has been making over the summer."
 
Nadella further writes, "So what’s next?  We continue to work hard on the migration to adCenter, and are optimistic about completing this phase later this fall.  As we have said all along, our primary goal is to provide advertisers with a quality transition experience in 2010, while being mindful of the holiday season."
 
I can't help recall Microsoft's baby cry in Japan when Yahoo! had a similar deal with Google to provide search results in the local market. Microsoft called that a monopolistic move.
 
Yahoo! Japan announced that Google will power its search and search-based advertising services. This move was in stark contrast with Yahoo!'s deal with Microsoft in the US.
 
Yahoo! expects that the deal will make it the #1 player in one of the world's strongest economies. But what lead Yahoo!, a Microsoft business partner, to dump the company and go along with its arch rival Google?

Microsoft not only hold but also exploits its monopolistic positions in several markets including Desktop OS and Office suites and Internet browser. GNU/Linux OS, OpenOffice.org and Firefox are giving stiff competition to Microsoft in these segments, but owing to anti-competitive practices in desktop segment where Microsoft's Windows gets pre-installed kills competitions. With Windows comes pre-installed Internet Explorer and an office suite thus leaving no space for competition.

However, in search space Microsoft's Bing is far behind Google. Despite Yahoo!, there is no threat that Microsoft will monopolize and thus criple this market as well.

“The search share for Bing remained flat month-over-month at 11 percent, and roughly 60 basis points lower than March levels, indicating that Bing’s momentum is perhaps slowing down. That said, with Yahoo’s share added… Bing should become the de-facto No. 2 search engine after Google," wrote Youssef Squali, an analyst with Jefferies & Co.