Poker is an interesting game - part skill, part luck, part psychology and a big set of balls especially if you are going to sit at the same table as Google and Microsoft and they are playing a game that is definitely not for the weak willed.

The latest round saw the cards of DoubleClick being dealt around the table and a growing pot in the middle of the table. It was going to be a case of who blinks first or possible in this round - who has the best bluff.

Much has been made out of the fact that Google was the winner and apparently gone home to savour its win over Microsoft once more (here, here and here) but two interesting points of view caught my eye as I made my way through my weekend posts relating to the purchase. The first one is the moat idea from Robert Scoble

The thing I see in common between YouTube and DoubleClick is that Google is buying a moat around its search engine advertising business. Google doesn’t want there to be ANY reason you’ll think of going with another advertising company. They are spending billions to protect their core business: contextual advertising delivered to search engine users. Since Microsoft doesn’t currently need moats (its core businesses, Windows and Office, have no real competitors left anymore that’ll try to jump the castle walls) Microsoft is willing to drop out of such deals when they get too rich.

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Which strategy is best? The conservative Microsoft approach? The rock and roll Google approach?

One of the things I think this shows is that while Google lives the Web 2.0 of get in there quick - get what you want and then leave, Microsoft takes a much longer outlook on the way it handles itself. For Microsoft to acquire something doesn’t always mean that it is buying what is lying on the surface. Microsoft looks further down the road and how things will affect a larger base of corporate interests rather than the fickleness of the webOS evangelists.

Then there was an interesting post from Mary Jo Foley where she wonders aloud whether Microsoft just played a massive bluff

But what if Microsoft bluffed? What if the Microsoft didn’t really want DoubleClick and simply wanted to bid up the price that Google had to pay to make its latest acquisition?

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If you look at Microsoft’s spending patterns, as of late, the company is leaning more toward doing less-than-$1-billion-sized acquisitions. In the increasingly rare cases when Microsoft does shell out big bucks (like close to $800 million for TellMe), it’s because it envisions the target as a technology acquisition, not an advertising/customer acquisition.

If this was the case it would be definitely a fine move in depleting your opposition’s warchest and may also indicate that Microsoft understands Google a lot better than some folks might give them credit for.

Maybe Microsoft knows that Google had stopped being a search engine a long time ago and was really nothing more than a high power advertising agency; whereas Microsoft is a platform company where search is just a part of the larger picture.

I know - I’m off my rocker on this one right?

Well think about it for a minute. What has Google done in a long while to revolutionize; or even eveolutionize, what is suppose to be their main focus - search. In contrast they have done more to progress their advertising platform whether it be by internal refinements or external purchases. And really they are no different than an advertising agency - The only difference is target and delivery.

Ad agencies use the traditional media; print and TV, in order to sell their clients products. With Google they use the concept of search to sell their clients products. Same idea - different methods so it really doesn’t matter to Google if search is in maintenance mode. After all it keeps their competitors eyes on a different ball and wasting money in the process.

Microsoft though I think has seen through this and is quite willing to let Google go down that road and do their very best to make it as expensive as possible for Google in the process. In the meantime Microsoft further solidifies it positions in hard dollar income platforms leaving the soft dollar market for others to fight over with only the barest show of putting up a fight.

However out of all of the posts about the purchase that I read the two best had to come from Google Blogoscoped; about how Google in 2017 purchases the whole Internet for a song and a dance, and then from webomatica who said for Google to have at it but to leave Apple alone.

I wonder which of those two will be next on the poker table

Conversation Tags: Microsoft, Google, DoubleClick, acquisitions, poker face