As everyone in the world surely knows by now, June 27th was Bill Gates’ last day at Microsoft. 

With 100s of books and 100,000s of blog posts detailing every known second of his controversial career, I won’t waste words saying what has already been said over and over again.  Surely, Bill Gates was a ruthless businessman.  He did not become the world’s richest man by befriending the competition.  Surely, Bill Gates was arrogant.  He didn’t withstand the most relentless antitrust litigation in US history (with his company virtually unscathed) by yielding to the prosecution. 

But, whatever you choose to think or say about Bill Gates, it is hard not to admire him for what he has already accomplished, what he continues to accomplish, and what he has contibuted to the world.  There aren’t many people who can make a legitimate claim to have had the impact on society that Bill Gates has had.  Whether the ideas were his own or stolen doesn’t really matter in the end.  Great leaders act on behalf of their advisors, their consituencies, and even their competition.  In national politics, “leaning over the isle” is considered a positive trait.  Whether Gates ran Microsoft ethically or not is largely irrelevant, and I challenge anyone to show me a large corporation that doesn’t do whatever it can to make more money for its leaders and shareholders.

Like him or not, Bill Gates wielded a tremendous amount of power at the helm of Microsoft, at least up until the last years.  At the end of his reign, I think we are all in a better place than we were when he started.  We have the internet.  We have cheap desktop computers.  Regardless of his ruthless business practices, his brutal treatment of the competition, or his arrogance against congress, he leaves the techno-world in a better place than he found it.  Few US presidents can say the same thing of their terms in office. 

Whatever your opinion of the man might be, we were all fortunate to have had Bill Gates to hold the reigns of the world of technology for a while.

Merely a few short weeks after Microsoft officially withdrew it’s bid to purchase Yahoo, Google has come into the picture with a corporate mashup that is sure to peak the interest of Capital Hill’s antitrust legions. 

June 12th, Yahoo put out a press release stating its intention to “strengthen [it's] competitive position in online advertising through [a] non-exclusive agreement with Google”.  By the terms of the agreement, Yahoo will now serve Google Adwords advertisements alongside their own, both in search results and on Yahoo’s thousands of highly-trafficked (but poorly monetized) content pages. 

Ads will also be shows on member’s sites within Yahoo’s Publisher Network, which has never seen the adoption of Google’s Adsense program, but still gives Google a boost in content ad placement inventory. 

This agreement is non-exclusive.  Meaning, Yahoo is free to pursue similar deals with other ad providers.  They are even still free to pursue acquisition by Microsoft, although that would carry a $250 million penalty (termination fee).

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo claims that by better monetizing searches and other page views on their properties, they are projecting an extra $800 million in annual revenue.  And, that’s just the beginning— integrating other Google ad serving technologies on to Yahoo’s vast (and widely-used) user pages would certainly mean other opportunities.

It is all good news for Yahoo, whose leadership (Jerry Yang) have come under intense scrutiny from Wall Street, investors and Carl Icahn for missing an opportunity to sell the company for top dollar and subsequently causing a dramatic drop in market cap.  The deal is a positive move to add revenue security in an uncertain time for the internet sector.

Certainly, this deal is going to be reviewed under an electron microscope by fair-trade officials and monopoly watchdogs at the Justice Department.  In fact, Yahoo has claimed that the deal will not go into effect for as long as three and a half months to permit time for thorough regulatory investigation.  Likely threatened by a Google-Yahoo partnership, Microsoft is expected to apply significant political pressure to add further hardship to making the execution of the deal a reality.

So, as a Google/Yahoo mashup appears to be in our near future, I propose the following names:

• Yahoogle
• Goohoo