This just in. There are legitimate reasons to believe that Microsoft is eyeing purchasing Yahoo in the near future. Estimated sales values have been projected as high as $50 billion dollars. Yahoo’s stock rose after speculation of Microsoft’s interest became more widespread today. Personally I think this could be an incredible purchase for Microsoft. Yahoo is far superior to MSN in every way. My only worry is that if Microsoft is able to make this purchase I hope they would not try to re-brand yahoo. I have a sneaking suspicion that if Microsoft did buy Yahoo that Yahoo would cease to exist within a year. Instead it would be merged with the inferior MSN product.

Obviously one of Microsoft’s biggest incentives to purchase Yahoo is to be able to seriously contend with Google in the search engine battlefield. If Microsoft were to buy Yahoo, Google would have lost out on the biggest web based company ever. $50 billion is no joking matter. It would be a highly important purchase for Microsoft. Neither Microsoft or Google can afford to NOT own Yahoo if it means one or the other will. As it is now, Google, Yahoo, and MSN are the top three search engines in the world. If Microsoft were to purchase Yahoo it would be a monumental occasion in the business world. Forget YouTube and MySpace. We are talking about $50 billion dollars here.

I would love to see this play out in Microsoft’s favor. Do I love Microsoft? No, but, I also do not love Google. Google needs to have some serious fire underneath them in order to keep them competitive. MSN is no threat to Google and Microsoft knows it, however, combined with Yahoo, MSN and Yahoo could collectively control a large portion of daily searches worldwide. I am all for Microsoft buying Yahoo and will be following this like a hawk. This could be the best news of 2007 for the internet world, as well as Microsoft stock holders. And let’s not forget that there has also been talks of Microsoft buying eBay.. I guess we should all keep our fingers crossed. The internet needs a good shaking up and these are just the purchases to do it.