(fused)

The vice president of Yahoo’s advanced developmental devision, Bradley Horowitz, has just just jumped ship to Google, claiming that it was nothing to do with the proposed takeover from Microsoft.

He mentioned in his blog that the timing was a bit unfortunate, and he has been with the company for nearly 4 years. His announcement comes just two days after another prominent employee left Yahoo.

Indeed, unfortunate timing. Right in the middle of lots of takeover rows. Maybe he couldn’t bear to work for Microsoft?

As most people know, Microsoft recently made a move to purchase Yahoo, saying that the general public needed an alternative to Google before it got too late, and I’m inclined to agree. Google does have total dominance at the moment, and some healthy competition wouldn’t be all bad ;)

However, some people have been saying that if this merger goes ahead, it will form a ‘Google Killer’ , that is to say that it will be the downfall of Google. This I seriously doubt, because while it will leech some of the revenue from Google, the products they offer beat the other search engines by far, and most importantly, they are fastest. Google search takes fractions of a second, the homepage isn’t littered with crap like Yahoo, and it doesn’t try to go over-web2.0 on you, like live search does. Everything is simple, and fast, and that’s what makes it dominant.

There is also the thought that if Microsoft and Yahoo merger, there could be a serious loss in income as teething problems are resolved, advertisers might choose to jump ship to Google, and what would happen if Microsoft decides to force Yahoo Mail and YIM into Hotmail and MSN? There would be chaos, and amidst it, the Google would take yet more market share, which is exactly the thing that Microsoft have set out to take off of them.

If Yahoo accept the takeover offer, then the merger will have to be done very carefully, or chaos will ensue, I think.