Who wins in the Microhoo deal?

Antitrust regulators worried about the new Yahoo-Microsoft partnership “should relax,” said Alexandra Petri in The Washington Post. It’ll be “‘anti-competitive’ only in the sense that it could backfire against Microhoo’s ability to compete” against Google. The two tech giants' taking on Google may sound like an unfair fight, but it’s like “my grandparents ganging up on The Rock in an alleyway.” On the off chance they do well, it’s good for competition.

“There is no way Google will not be the primary beneficiary” of the Microhoo deal, said John Dvorak in MarketWatch. Why? With Yahoo search gone, Google will only have one main competitor. Or look at it this way: If “a big bully is beating up two small kids to take their quarters,” the kids won’t be any better off if only one of them holds all the quarters.

From where we’re sitting, said the San Francicso Chronicle in an editorial, “wily Microsoft is coming out on top” once more. For no cash up front, Microsoft gets to hijack “Yahoo’s better-trafficked site as a platform for its new search engine, Bing.” And Yahoo’s the one that will have to lay off workers—maybe one of “those spurned Yahoo search employees” can start a real competitor to Google.

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The partnership actually “makes tactical sense” for both Yahoo and Microsoft, said Greg Vogel in Forbes. Yahoo’s essentially a media company, and Microsoft is a technology company, and this deal plays to their strengths—Yahoo gets more ad revenue, Microsoft takes an “incremental step” toward upping its Web traffic. The real test is who can win the next round of the Internet fight—search alone won’t do it.