The Economist has an interesting story on what Yahoo/MSN/eBay can learn from the Napoleonic era to defeat their common enemy (read Google):Prince Klemens Metternich, foreign minister of the Austrian Empire during the Napoleonic era and its aftermath, would have no trouble recognising Google.Justin Post, an analyst at Merrill Lynch, said recently that Microsoft's "acquisition probability" is now so high that it may soon start pushing up the share prices of eBay and Yahoo! Mr Post thinks that Microsoft is most likely to bid for Yahoo! [Thanks, Amit]
To him, the world's most popular web-search engine would closely resemble the Napoleonic France that in his youth humiliated Austria and Europe's other powers.
Its rivals Yahoo!, eBay, and Microsoft would look a lot like Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Metternich responded by forging an alliance among those three monarchies to create a "balance of power" against France. Google's enemies, he might say, ought now to do the same thing.
The alliance against Google | Klemens Wenzel von Metternich
Related: Google, a common enemy | Microsoft may acquire eBay
