In the continuing AOL sweepstakes, it would appear MSN could be the winner over Google.

So, what will it mean for all 3 companies?

As you can know, the AOL unit at Time Warner has been trouncing around for the year while trying to discover a way to stay important.

The difficulty for AOL, naturally, is the repeatedly decreasing use of dial-up modems as a system for accessing the Web . Depending on the study you look act, dial-up modem access now accounts for roughly forty p.c of all Net users. This number is doggedly dropping as DSL and wire Net access systems become more well-liked. The ensuing struggles at AOL are having a fascinating result on the search engine wars. Google and MSN try to position themselves to reign supreme over online search. The situation boils down as the following : Google is the king, MSN wants to be it. This situation takes on especially engaging impact when one considers that Google now supplies advertisements and search results to AOL. In doing so, Google derives approximately ten % of its cash from the AOL relationship. In the summer of 2005, rumours started that AOL was for sale. The sole problem was both corporations realized AOL was a good short term play, but an awful long term one given the demise of dial-up modem systems.

So who would buy AOL and how much would they be ready to pay? Would Google let MSN swipe ten p.c of its business? If this is so how high could Google drive up the cost of AOL for MSN? If rumours are to be credited, MSN and Time Warner have reached a deal on the AOL platform. So, how much will MSN pay Time Warner for AOL? The operatives at Google are making a major mistake, a critical blunder. Google will lose ten % of its business to MSN without MSN being made to use any resources for the business. The Google Adwords program, the first cash source for Google, will not be on AOL.

Certainly Google might have come up with something more tempting to AOL or at least forced MSN to pay some major money for the purchase. Google is a great search engine, but this is only 1 in a number of business mistakes manufactured by the Web giant.