L.G.: What's your dog's name?

M.A.: Laguna, like Laguna Beach. She's a chocolate lab. She weighs 100 pounds. She's a really cool dog. She's actually had some medical problems lately. Last week, she had an M.R.I. and some other stuff done, but it looks like she's going to be okay.

L.G.: Oh gosh, well I'm glad. I'm sorry to hear that you've been going through that. But tell me what you think is going to happen with a couple of things: Will Microsoft be successful in its bid to acquire Yahoo?

M.A.: I put it at about 70 percent likely that the deal will happen-maybe a little higher.

L.G.: You think they're going to have to come up in their bid?

M.A.: I think that they could come up. If the stock market falls, if Microsoft's stock falls any further, I think that there's a chance they could even drop the bid. I think ultimately they'll win.

L.G.: Over what time period?

M.A.: Over the course of weeks or months. Things can be accelerated if Microsoft decided to increase the bid, for instance. The problem is, Yahoo doesn't have a viable third-party alternative. If one were to pop up —

L.G.: News Corp doesn't fit that category?

M.A.: From what I hear, no.

L.G.: Even though you reported on your website that they had sent five people or four people out there [to negotiate].

M.A.: Yeah, my understanding is, they're having a lot of trouble getting to a deal that pencils out the evaluations that everyone needs and that the stockholders would accept. So, as far as I know, no bid has been finalized yet.

L.G.: Assuming this happens, what are the implications of Microsoft acquiring Yahoo? What do you see as the benefits and the possible pitfalls of that?

M.A.: Well, the first thing is, it gives them a ton of page views, and page views are important when it comes to advertising networks-because they're going to want to serve as many ads as possible. So the more page views you have, the more advertising you would have. The more advertising, they'll be forced to go onto their platform, so they'll provide some competitive strain on Google right away. Yahoo properties, in general, tend to be better than the Microsoft Web properties, as well, so for the most part, Microsoft could sort of end their efforts on the Web space-just merge those teams into the Yahoo teams. But it's still unclear that they would be competitive over the long haul with Google and the search-advertising side, based on just the number of customers that Google has and the technology that Google has. It might be that Google continues to take market share, even from the combined entity. Or it might be that somehow they're able to fight and take a bit themselves. Most markets break down into an 80-20 rule, though, and Google seems to be turning up to that 80 percent of the market share. And Microsoft takes care of the 20 percent with Yahoo. That's still a big market, but it's not Google.

L.G.: And what's the future of Google, in your view? Their stock has certainly plunged over the last few months.

M.A.: I think the January quarter where they talked about MySpace not being very revenue-friendly is interesting. A couple of days ago they launched a new feature called automatic matching, and what this is, it's a way to take more money away from the advertisers. So if an advertiser has a budget, and the budget isn't fulfilled with ads, with the keywords that they want, Google will try to spend that money on different keywords that they think are still okay. And it shows that they're trying to find innovative ways to grab more and more money from the advertisers. To me-and this is just me speculating-it suggests that the organics for natural growth are slowing in a way that they don't like, and now they're sort of trying to scramble to find cool ways to continue turning the knob. And that's not a good sign. When you're at that point, sometimes it suggests that growth might be stalling. So we'll see what happens-if there is a recession and it does hit the online advertising space, Google could be hit very hard.

L.G.: I see. What do you predict for Facebook—which some people have suggested could be something like the next Google in terms of sheer power and size, or could end up like Friendster and sort of fade toward oblivion. What do you think?

M.A.: Well, Facebook is interesting because it has a lot of page views. It's one of the biggest factors on the internet in terms of page views, top five or six, but what they don't have is a lot of search, and search page views are the most monetizable page views on the internet. So monetizing Facebook in a Google-like way is going to be very, very hard. Now, in '98, '99, no one thought searches were all that monetizable either, and then when they paired what had been a go-to with Yahoo, people thought, "Oh, wow, you can make a lot of money on search marketing," and Google perfected that market. Maybe somebody will find a way to do that with social networking as well, and if anyone will do it, it's probably Facebook because they're so innovative—but until they do, having a lot of page views doesn't mean they're ever going to have a lot of revenue. So that's their challenge—to find new revenue streams that are substantial.

L.G.: So do you think Mark Zuckerberg is up to this? I've seen reports that he's thinking of or is being urged to bring in somebody to be C.E.O. to let him be more creative and not actually manage the company on a day to day basis.

M.A.: Well a C.O.O. could manage the company on a day to day basis. I think he makes a good C.E.O. He's still very young. I think he's growing up a lot faster than he normally would, but he seems to be handling it well.

L.G.: How old are you, by the way?

M.A.: I'm 37. He strikes me, in the time I've spent with him, as, I don't want to use the word brash, but adventurous. Willing to try new things without, you know, the harm of having failed before to stop him, or make him hesitate. But he also seems to take the advice of people around him. So he seems like he's got what it takes to be one of the legends of Silicon Valley. He just has to execute. So personally, I don't think him stepping aside makes any sense. Now, hiring strong people around him, like Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin] did [at Google], makes a lot of sense. And he may theoretically hand over the C.E.O. title, but I could also see him keeping that title and just hiring-