Anticompetitive if GOOG buys, but not MSFT?
MSN, MSNBC, Live, Hotmail, and Terraserver are already Microsoft. Those compare pretty directly to Google, Google News, Google Docs, GMail, and Google Earth from what I can tell. They're also fairly close to Yahoo, Yahoo News, Yahoo Mail, and Yahoo Maps for that matter, although not as close as to Google's offerings. Microsoft sells ads on its sites. What exactly is it that Google does that Microsoft doesn't do that would make one anti-competitive and not the other?
LinkExchange, aQuantive, Numinous, CompareNet, MotionBridge, Onfolio, Placeware, Vermeer, Jellyfish, and Multimap weren't in the same business niches as Yahoo? Microsoft already bought all of those companies with mapping, online collaboration, mobile Internet, online shopping, and advertising tech.
Microsoft is making large portions of its web presence depend on its proprietary web "enhancement" crap called Silverlight. How long before we need a special browser or special browser plugin to view Yahoo's sites if this goes through?
What's to say Microsoft won't play with its new toy for six months, then can the whole list of Yahoo's services other than Flickr? They bought Golive, renamed Golive Cyberstudio Microsoft Golive, then canned everything else. They bought Visio and canned all but one product. It's in their history to just shut things down.
It's safe to assume they're not interested in anything technical. When they bought Hotmail, it was a Unix shop. They quickly set to changing it into a Windows shop. Yahoo runs, from the last I heard, Linux and BSD. Surely Microsoft couldn't allow that.
Google's not the company that charged white-box computer builders for DOS and Windows licenses on OS/2 preloads just in case their software preloads were being underreported, or as a way to stifle IBM's product (which MS itself got a royalty on). Google's not the company that used Stac Electronic's disk compression technology after trying and failing to buy Stac or license its patents. Google didn't put out a third-rate visual web site editing tool that wrote nonstandard crap that only the company's nonstandard crap browser would render.
In short, Microsoft calling anyone anti-competitive or implying anyone else's possible actions might be anticompetitive is just farcical.