"Microsoft will Survive. Google will Dominate. Yahoo is Toast"

Is Yahoo toast?:

Microsoft the underdog, by Matthew DeBord, Commentary, LA Times: At long last, we have resolution: Microsoft will not ... be taking over Yahoo and going toe-to-toe with mighty Google... Instead, Yahoo, the definitive Web 1.0 company, will be casting its lot with ... Google, the definitive Web 2.0 company. Microsoft, the definitive Web 0.0 company -- ...plying the increasingly dreary straits of operating systems and software -- is out in the cold.

This drama has been playing out since the mid-'90s, when the Internet first established itself as a ... compelling counterpoint to the era of Microsoft, which thanks to its monopoly on the operating system for PCs ... had dominated the dawn of personal computing.

Google and its emerging monopoly on search-based Web advertising is the new name of the game. And now that Microsoft is almost categorically excluded from that competition, we are witnessing the final days of Web 1.0. It may look as though Yahoo has somehow saved itself by rebuffing Microsoft and teaming up with the dark lords of Mountain View. But this is not the case. Microsoft will survive. Google will dominate. Yahoo is toast. ...

In the end, Yahoo believed that it was better to bond with Google, the big new thing, and continue to flip Microsoft the bird, as it has long done. And so, Yahoo has sealed its doom. Our only hope now, as we spy the gruesome Pax Googleannica of Web 3.0 on the horizon, is that renegade survivors of the Web 1.0 pioneer that took its name from Jonathan Swift's race of barbarians will say, "Enough," and join with their former sworn foe to give hope to those of us who see the Web as something better than a merciless "Matrix"-like monetized quantification of all we do and all we are. That's right, as Yahoo makes its Faustian pact with Google, Microsoft -- Microsoft! -- has finally become the heroic underdog.