I don't see how a lot of these smaller niche vendors are going to survive. They're going to have to be swallowed up by the bigger companies in the food chain.

Niche players can have one bad quarter and they don't have the wherewithal to survive that, or at least survive it easily.

Traditional search engines are good at searching what's on the Web.

Microsoft and Yahoo say they are doing this to give consumers what they want, but I think if you ask consumers they would say they want interoperability all the way [across the two services].

Combined they could be extraordinary, but that doesn't [automatically] move them to the upper echelon. It puts them in the right path but not by default.

Yahoo has done a spectacularly good job of buying these small companies and letting them retain the entrepreneurial drive that got them where they are, while also taking the intellectual property developed and using effectively across Yahoo properties.