Nothing represents the changing of the guard as much as how the Big Three Portals have fallen from grace.  Don’t get me wrong: from an operational standpoint, Yahoo! (YHOO) is a fine property, but that company is a bit of a… how do you say, disaster.

MSN is there, trekking along, costing Microsoft (MSFT) billions in losses over the years without really making a push for #1.  Sort of like all other MSFT products not named Windows or Office, basically.

Meanwhile, Time Warner's (TWX) AOL is drifting along, buying up more and more assets - some smart, some not - but now putting itself up for sale.  While the company sold a 5% stake of itself to Google (GOOG) for a $1B sum - valuing itself for a tidy $20B - word is that it might be content with a $15B offer… which means either Yahoo!, MSFT, News Corp. (NWS), or Comcast (CMCSA) would show an interest.

While some will be quick to say the portals lost to social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, make no mistake about it, they lost to search.  Revenues matter, everything else is noise.  Google has the web ecosystem in the bag, and considering that Google’s YouTube is more dominating in video than Google is in search - and that video is the next high growth opportunity after search’s decade - then you have to wonder how much more hurting Google can put on the Web.

When you consider how leadership in search helped Google propel itself to King of the Web, you sort of understand why MSFT just shelled out $100M for something that basically can be summed up as Wikipedia site search.

• Waiting Impatiently for a New Yahoo CEO  »
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Ashkan Karbasfrooshan

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