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"The acquisition of aQuantive by Microsoft  has been completed.  Agency Avenue A l Razorfish and the Atlas ad-serving platform are included in the deal.  The acquisition was valued at about $6 billion, marking it as one of the largest in Microsoft history.  See our initial coverage here.\nA new team has been put in place to head up the new group, \"Advertiser and Publishing Solutions Group\" which will include Brian McAndrews, CEO of aQuantive, who will be responsible for the building the monetization engine, Steve Berkowitz, who will be responsible for online services such as the MSN.com portal and Windows Live services, Satya Nadella, who will be working on search technologies and designing an ad platform for Microsoft's business, and Yusef Mehdi, who will oversee internal mergers, acquisitions and partnerships. \nThe conclusion of this deal highlights the importance of Microsoft in the search and advertising platform, as the necessity to continually compete with others in the market, including Google, becomes more and more apparent.  In related news, CNet's independent study has found Ask.com's search privacy policy to be the safest for end users, while Microsoft's is towards the bottom of the list for the five major search engines surveyed.  From Google to Yahoo, the other search engines have been in an acquisition frenzy lately as well.\n[via  Search Engine Land]"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2007/08/13/microsoft-aquantive-2/>