A Fortune piece by senior editor David Kirkpatrick said that in the end, Microsoft is almost surely going to end up owning Yahoo's search business. And "even what does seem like erratic behavior on the part of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer... points toward that inevitable conclusion."

And it's all because of Google. Kirkpatrick writes that Google drives Microsoft crazy for two reasons: it figured out how to make a ton of money in an entirely new way for the tech industry, and it became the most powerful tech company on the market as a result, taking the crown from Microsoft.

Kirkpatrick argues that it's not really true; Google isn't the most powerful tech company. It just happened to create the world's most powerful marketplace.

However, he does go on to say that Microsoft owns a site called Live.com that offers search results that in many cases are just as good as Google's, and sometimes are better. This isn't something that I agree with, but that's not his main point. He says that, essentially, the train has left the station, and the only way Microsoft can catch up now is by suddenly creating a larger marketplace than Google. The only way it can do that is by buying Yahoo.