rumor-1: Fox swapping myspace ofr 1/3 of Yahoo how to get 11billion out of 580. And suggested there: Yahoo giving up and giving search to google
rumor-2: Google buying Apple. The Steve not liking to come to work anymore.
rumor-3: [And I made this up]: Microsoft giving up and going open source. Nobody wanted to play with the gray elephant in the room that used to be a store.
back to 1&2: that could mean that google is the only remaining search engine. It was in a way anyway. But now it gets real tricky. Getting the enire email market could be quick second: Just funnel enough millions into the spam engine to keep the volume up, so that only people with very vast computing resources can survice in the email market. Already in todays brave new world Google could control vast amounts of spam: Just a slight tweak of a specific search quality parameter and somebody gets allot of money somewhere. Much of those funds would be reinvested in measures that come quiet expensive to counter for wannabe Google competitors.