Microsoft has gone on the full offensive in their attack to purchase Yahoo!.  According to a recent press release this made Yahoo! shares jump 17.96% making me very happy since I own Yahoo stock. Yahoo!’s current market cap is $44.41 billion, wait it just went up to $44.60 billion. Some think Yahoo! will sell at over $50 billion.

This would be good for Internet users if the culture of Microsoft does not overwhelm Yahoo!’s. I think that Yahoo is a better company than Google and has a much wider range of services. Statistics show that users spend much more time on a Yahoo! site than on Google.

Yahoo! has announced that it is purchasing the remaining equity in one of the largest emerging online advertising exchanges Right Media for $680 million. Yahoo! first became involved with Right Media when it purchased 20% of the company in October 2006.

With the two largest search engines buying online ad agencies a number of conflict issues are raised by these purchases. If a client uses Right Media will they be advised to use Google for additional advertising or just Yahoo? This does open up a number of opportunities for the advertisers.