• Silicon Alley Insider, Friday, November 16, 2007 10:45 AM

Microsoft's so-called "10, 20, 30, 40" plan may have left you scratching your head in disbelief-and for good reason: a 30 percent search share and a 40 percent Web advertising share sound like impossible goals for the next three-to-five years considering where the company is today. Sure, the $6 billion acquisition of aQuantive will help boost Web revenues, but not to such an extreme extent.

Short of calling Microsoft's Kevin Johnson "a moron," Silicon Alley Insider's Henry Blodget assumes that Johnson was dropping a serious hint that Microsoft is planning to scoop up beleaguered Web rival Yahoo in the near future, because "he could not possibly be imagining that Microsoft could do this on its own."

A Yahoo purchase, Blodget says, is the only way Microsoft could come close to achieving those goals. For example, the combined company would immediately hit the 30 percent search target, and come close to boosting its ad share to 40 percent. Meanwhile, Blodget says the acquisition would be "disastrous" for Yahoo, but it wouldn't much matter if the software giant came in "with a Murdoch-like offer."

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