Yahoo, with its new Mayer led CEO, is trying to get out of a 10 year agreement with Microsoft to use Bing (a natural language search engine). Yahoo would make more profit from advertising if it used Google.
Microsoft made a mistake when it bought a natural language search startup that became Bing.
I could have told them at the time but I'm sure they would not have listened to me. Too smart by a half.
Google is a service monopoly. In a book called Gods of Commerce that I published in the early 1990s I explained what a service monopoly is.
If you offer any service where there is a network advantage, that can be a Yellow Pages, a network like Craigslist, a currency, anything where the greater number of users the greater the usefulness. That is a service monopoly. Google is a service monopoly.
The monopoly status will be maintained as long as customers do not find a single significant activity that is missing from a service monopoly. If such a single significant activity is missing a new service monopoly can rapidly grow to replace the former.
Google isn't anywhere near having a single significant missing activity. Google moves very rapidly to fill any holes in its service.
Bing is one of many search engines that will have no future. Too bad for Yahoo and Microsoft.
The exception to my rule about service monopolies, of course, will be in some tyrannical country that has a unique language like China.