Often the prospect of two giant companies merging causes me heart to beat rapidly with a sort of quiet rage. Generally this is because I either know I will be directly harmed by the reduced competition (as in the case of the Rogers takeover of Fido, I actually felt pain as my beloved Fido ceased to exist, apart from name, and prices went up and service became horrendous), or because I feel a sort righteous sympathy for those who will be.

I feel none of this in regard to the proposed, and increasingly probable merger of Microsoft and Yahoo. Bring it on, I say! Now I could tell you my reason is noble. That I long to see the over-mighty Google face some serious competition. After all I can’t really stand Google and there half-assed style of software development, especially their over-hyped Gmail. I have a Gmail account that I have never used, with an address I have never shared and it receives hundreds of spam messages in a week, more than the rest of my email accounts combined by a huge margin. And the interface is ugly. And how long has this thing been in Beta? Does Google even understand what a Beta is? Actually, no, they don’t, because they release nothing but half-cooked ugly looking software, and people eat it up for some reason. Maybe it’s because they have Microsoft. Maybe it’s because they like Google’s Baby block logo. Anyway, I don’t like Google.

But that’s not my motive for cheering on merger between MS and Yahoo. Oh no. My motive is purely selfish. You see, I have been trying to sign up for a new Yahoo account for a while now, and every user name I pick that resembles my name in any way prompts Yahoo to tell me it’s not available. They then graciously offer to ad a random number to the end of it. I’m just not buying it because I have a very uncommon last name, and I am reasonably sure I am the only person in the English speaking world with my first a last name together. So I am dying for a merger so MS can hurry up and merge my Windows Live ID with Yahoo.