BusinessWeek has an article where Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer speaks out about, among other things, the recent Google-YouTube acquisition.

He is quite critical of Google’s decision, stating that it was a bad move, because apparently YouTube hasn’t got a viable business model.

Is there a business model? Right now, there’s no business model for YouTube that would justify $1.6 billion. And what about the rights holders? At the end of the day, a lot of the content that’s up there is owned by somebody else.

But he goes on to make an interesting point which, if true, could well affect all the acquisition rumours (with $1bn+ price tags) that fly around everywhere.

Look, there are only [a few] buyers who can buy anything over a billion dollars in this space. There’s us [Microsoft]. There’s eBay. There’s Yahoo. And there’s Google. I don’t think there’s anybody else. Even Amazon has a market cap of only $13 billion. I don’t think they’re going to do too many $1 billion deals. So you’ve got maybe four guys who will buy in that range. And there’s the public market.

It’s quite an interesting interview to read through, and while I most definitely don’t agree with most of the things Ballmer says, he raises some interesting points.