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advertising, but by then Google was pulling ahead. An outsourcing deal with Google was considered and rejected. For the past two years Yahoo! has invested oodles in a project called Panama that was meant, again, to catch Google.

Presumably Yahoo! has been exerting itself so because it believes that the advertising technology is, along with search, the source of competitive advantage in the internet era. That is certainly what Microsoft believes, which is why it bought aQuantive, an online-advertising specialist, and built its own search-ads platform, called adCenter. What Yahoo! and Microsoft lack is volume—in the number of both searches and advertisers bidding to place ads. Teaming up would help to address that problem; but a capitulation by Yahoo! to Google would merely invite antitrust regulators to look at Google’s dominance.

Mr Yang could merge Yahoo! with AOL, the web portal of Time Warner, but AOL already outsources its search ads to Google and would be of no help at all in catching the leader. Asserting, as Mr Yang does, that Yahoo! all by itself could become “the starting point” on the internet, and its advertising powerhouse, rings hollow.

Things look just as bleak for Mr Ballmer. He has invested billions trying to make Microsoft an internet and advertising superpower. But it seems not to matter. According to Danny Sullivan, a web-search analyst, Microsoft “literally has no brand” when it comes to its online services—nobody has ever been advised “to Live” or “to MSN” a recipe or a cute classmate. The only one having any fun continues to be Google.