Microsoft to Google: You Are The Monopoly Now, and We Are The Loosers

Bilal Hameed | 25 Views

Microsoft, a name that is as attached to antitrust battles as it is with Operating Systems, has urged regulators to scrutinize Google’s plans to buy DoubleClick, an online advertising company.

Microsoft claims that the $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick will hurt competition in the online advertising market and will also raise questions about the amount of personal information available to Google. According to Mr Smith Microsoft’s general counsel “Google and DoubleClick together could observe and capture consumer information on an unprecedented scale.” Microsoft is also rallying others like Yahoo and Time Warner, both of which also lost to Google in the bidding of DoubleClick, to come up and support the blocking of this deal.

The claim by Microsoft is really hilarious given the fact that they were the initial suitor to DoubleClick and that they had the potential to outbid Google, given the fact that they have a bigger cash pile $49 billion as against Google´s $13 billion. Another key aspect of this is the fact that the Company that was feared and accused of being anti competitive and of being a monopoly is now crying in the face of competition from Google, may be they really are dead now.

Google is the world’s dominant online advertising player when it comes to serving text based ads, that are targeted on a number of factors including interests, preferences, demography and so on. These ads although quiet popular and useful to the long tail of small business owners, are not liked by large corporations because they are not good at building brand recognition. These mega corporations want their logos and images of their products to be displayed and served to consumers in the form of banner ads to build brand recognition. Banner based graphical and video ads is exactly the area in which DoubleClick is the market leader. The merger of the two companies would create an ultimate ad platform for online advertisement. Google on the other hand is also taking giant strides to offer ads in video, gaming, mobile and digital outdoor content in a bid to offer advertisers to reach consumers anywhere in the digital world.

Google and DoubleClick will also move ahead and set up an ad exchange for buying and selling of ads. In an age where everything from collectibles to commodities are sold on exchanges this would be a terrific move. In my opinion in a couple of years the Ad Exchange platform alone would be worth as much as eBay.

Our coverage of the entire DoubleClick fiasco is here.

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