• Your Biz, Wednesday, April 16, 2008 1:15 PM

The Sunnyvale/Redmond saga continues, and while it may seem like the proposed acquisition isn't quite relevant to small business owners now, marketing types that actually work with both companies say that the way the deal shakes out could greatly affect Mom and Pop shops for the worse.

"Heaven would be if Microsoft purchased Yahoo, kept Yahoo intact under the Yahoo brand, and used Yahoo search and Yahoo Search Marketing to power Microsoft Live," said Miki Dzugan, president of Rapport Online.

However, if the software giant chose to go the other way and bundle everything under Live and the adCenter platform, then small business owners would be forced to grapple with a subpar service.

"People hate using Microsoft," Dzugan said. "They are arrogant and they don't have very good software, competitively speaking. Using Microsoft adCenter is very slow, and I find I burn up a lot more time managing it than I do Yahoo or Google."

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