by Jeffrey Rayport

Early February marked an unprecedented offer by Microsoft to purchase Yahoo! for more than $44 billion – a dramatic move that seemed to signal the potential demise of Google’s domination of the online ad market. Yet, if a Microsoft-Yahoo deal is made, does the company stand a chance at catching Google in the race for online ad dollars? Jeffrey Rayport, the founder and chairman of Marketspace LLC, a business unit of Monitor Group, doesn’t think so.

In his “Viewpoint” column published in the February 4 issue of BusinessWeek magazine, Rayport says, “Google has it all: scale (more unique users than any other online site), an endlessly expanding array of features (tools and applications released continuously in beta versions on its site), and clearly superior analytics (which started with search-based advertising and is now expanding into extensive data mining of millions of search patterns and user profiles.” And that’s why Google has proven victorious in the competition for advertising on the Web among the other three “Big Four” companies – Yahoo, Time Warner’s AOL and Microsoft’s MSN.

So while a united Microsoft-Yahoo would level the playing field down to the “Big Two” – pitting the “reigning behemoth of the PC operating system vs. the emergent giant of the online world” to compete for online consumers – Rayport still gives Google the game-winning advantage.