There's lots and lots of talk all over the blogosphere regarding the potential acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft. There are quite a few spouting how terrible it will be if this happens. People seem to think that 'evil' Microsoft monopoly will get ahold of some percentage of the internet and ruin it. That's a knee-jerk reaction, in my opinion. Not everyone is reacting that way, techcrunch has an interesting post on it up.
First of all, when it comes to a monopoly on the internet, only one company has it and is actively going after it. Google. Now, I use Google and love a lot of their services, but they are actively seeking a monopoly on parsing and analyzing all information that flows through the internet. Their various services extend across the internet and make website after website dependent on their infrastructure (much like computer after computer became dependent on windows).
They seek this through everything from their advertisement model to email. They seek it too in their 'open' APIs, which essentially tie everyone, in the end, to their servers. Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. It depends on what they do with the dependency so many have and will have on their infrastructure. It depends on if they truly won't be 'evil'.
In regards to Yahoo, while Google has the billion dollar algorithms, I think they have always been better at user interface. I much prefer Yahoo mail over Google, for example. So, combining Yahoo's web know-how with Microsoft's financial and marketing juggernaut could push Google towards bettering some of their weaknesses (like customer support and marketing their products). Yahoo's brand makes Microsoft friendlier. Microsoft's brand makes more Yahoo dangerous to competitors (read: Google).
I think Google's response to a Microsoft/Yahoo merger (read: acquisition) would be to buy some giant marketing firm, some giant customer support company, update the user interfaces on their products and start going to town. That would be very interesting. They might even have to start bringing some of their products out of beta.