I know everyone has heard the news about Microsoft making a bid to takeover Yahoo! with a buyout price of $44.6 billion dollars. Once this article broke on February 1st, the Internet and blogsphere went abuzz with speculations and opinions on how the merging of Microsoft and Yahoo! would go down. Over the Superbowl Weekend I must have read over 60 posts from various blogs about the Microsoft - Yahoo deal. My personal opinion and conclusion is that the merging of these two entities will suck for general Internet users and affiliate marketers. Want to know why?

First, the two giants will not merge their ad networks so marketers will still need to maintain two accounts. Secondly, I would expect many periods of downtime due to the merging of systems and data sets. Lastly, the possibility to lose the use of cool tools such as Yahoo!’s backlink checker.

Anyone else got any thoughts on why the MS and Yahoo! merger is good or bad? If you do please leave some comments below.