Microsoft Takes Google Scraps

Perhaps you can see a pattern here.

First, Google walks away from the Yahoo deal, leaving Yahoo scrambling to find a way out of its deepening financial troubles. A nervous and seemingly desperate Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang shows up at the Web 2.0 conference and virtually begs Microsoft to buy his company from the stage. (Although Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said nothing doing a few days ago, ZDNet's Larry Dignan quotes a few analysts who insist that the time is right for such a deal and concludes that it's just a matter of time before only Microsoft and Google are left in the search-ad market.)

Then, Google drops Sun Microsystem's StarOffice suite of word processing and spreadsheet programs from its "Google Pack" of software consumers might find useful. In addition, Google has discontinued a Sun partnership in which Sun distributes the Google toolbar with its Java Runtime Environment software. Sun has been in serious trouble lately, losing $1.7 billion in the last quarter, and Google apparently decided it was time to move on. What did Sun immediately do? Turn to Microsoft and agree to distribute its Microsoft Live Search toolbar instead.

It seems that as Google walks away from partners it no longer needs, Microsoft is waiting to snatch them up into an anything-but-Google coalition. Google is dabbling in everything from apps to mobile smartphones and hybrid cars, but one of the things you get when you break into a new market is an army of competitors terrified at your endless capital reserves. Right now, it seems, Microsoft is the unifying principle around all of these lesser companies, the refuge they seek when Google blows into town. Ten years ago, of course, Microsoft was the company everyone loved to hate; now, it's the one thing that may save the world from Google.