Well I'm certainly glad IBM and the National Football League partnered recently to help the global media get access to news and video highlights from NFL football games, particularly last evening's SuperBowl XLII (42).

I'm as big a football fan as the next guy, but let's face it, in recent years the SuperBowl has become an excuse to get together and criticize and banter about the TV commercials.

(Which I did via Twitter last night, which held up against the offense rush of geeks around the globe all throughout the game. Twitter server infrastructure, first down!)

But no, not last night. Especially not in the fourth quarter.

My heart goes out to all my friends who are New England Patriots fans (and I have many of them). The perfect season was not to be.

And my sincere congratulations go out to Eli Manning and his cohorts, particularly that unbelievable helmet catch by David Tyree.

ESPN's Greg Garber's calling it a play for the ages. I'm thinking it might have to serve as the mold for some sort of new NFL trophy -- the Lombardi equivalent of crazy, major game-changing plays.

But enough gridiron reports. When I wrote the headline for this post, I wasn't referring to football.

Great matchup and game though it was, I'm not sure SuperBowl XLII had anything on the Google v. Microsoft battle that started brewing over the weekend when David Drummond, Google senior VP of corporate development and chief legal officer, filed this blog post on the "Official Google blog."

In it, Drummond poses the following questions:

"Could the acquisition of Yahoo! allow Microsoft -- despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses -- to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet?...Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors' email, IM, and web-based services?"

Hey, no point in waiting for the ink from Ballmer's letter to Jerry Yang and the Yahoo! board to dry before raising the battle flag, right?

Mark Cuban has an interesting perspective on the sit-shee-a-shun, suggesting that a combined MicroHoo could force the market to look much closer at Google's business once there's no Yahoo for Google to "outperform" anymore.

May be, Mark, but even with Google's stock down over the last couple of weeks, most of those earnings announcements in, oh, say, the last 12-14 quarters, seem to have withstood Wall Street scrutiny.

But then again, I guess even Mountain View isn't immune from the gathering fears of a consumer-led recession.

Cuban's advice to Yang and the Gang: Sell!

P.S. BTW, on the SuperBowl ad front, I liked a number of the spots, including the FedEx carrier pigeons, the Cars.com "Stone Circle" and "Witch Doctor," and Bud Light's "Breathing Fire."

But my personal favorite had to be the eTrade Baby Trader. What to do with all that extra coin, indeed.

Technorati Tags: acquisitions, google, microsoft, nfl, antitrust, superbowl, yahoo