A sad day for Yahoo! That's the consensus -- a rare one -- across both global technology and investor communities. Yahoo stock dropped 10 percent, Microsoft rose one percent. For once, the markets may have got it right. The decision to work together on their search engines is a big mistake for Yahoo, and a small gain for Microsoft.

But it was coming, even if we didn't see exactly this 10-year deal in which Microsoft's Bing will power Yahoo Search.

When Yahoo India started shopping for public relations services recently, I had a number of phone interviewers asking what I thought was great about Yahoo. I had to say: Nothing. There is no outstanding feature or technology I could think of. But there were so many where they led the way, to give it up to others.

Yahoo is nowhere in search. They gave that up to Google, the company that was powering Yahoo Search in the early years of this decade. Even Microsoft overtook them -- something few would have imagined was possible. Google, Microsoft Bing and Yahoo have 60 percent, 16 percent and 10 percent of search traffic, according to a major web analytics firm.

Yahoo was early into mail, communities and mobile tech. But it couldn't hold its lead. It's strong in its finance portal and Yahoo groups, but not enough to sway users away from the search-centred Google, which has rapidly gone past Yahoo, investing in Gmail, maps, mobile, and a range of other tech ahead of the curve. Yahoo missed the writing on the wall about the power of search, something Google saw and used effectively -- creating its Gmail offering centred on its then-path breaking 1 GB free space and Google search.

What happens in India? There is little effect. With or without the deal, Yahoo could have made an impact on this virgin market, but it didn't.

India's Internet business itself is limited by low penetration of personal computers and Net connections. There are just over six million broadband connections. But the real excitement is in mobile, with well over 400 million subscribers. And one tech industry group has set a target of 100 million broadband connections by 2012.

This is, thus, the land of opportunity.