In his article entitled MSN Renews With Overture -- for Now Kevin Newcomb, who I like and respect, makes a misguided leap of logic in saying:

"The company has a few options for technology that accepts bids and bills advertisers. It could build a solution in-house, which would presumably be simple enough for its army of programmers."

Let me give you a simple analogy to help you frame this (and future) analysis in this space:

Here in my apartment, I have the necessary resources to, all on my own, bake a batch of chocolate chip cookies that would beat Chips Ahoy in a blind taste test.

But, I'm not a competitive threat to Nabisco, because I lack the capability to cost/time-effectively produce (let alone distribute) the 100MMs of cookies it would take for them to notice me.

Building, maintaining and extending a bidded marketplace (and all of the necessary supporting technology [which goes well beyond accepting bids and billing advertisers] and human processes) that scales to millions of advertisers and billions of queries is not a trivial undertaking.