Obviously both sides don't agree that the relationship is mutually beneficial. If one side not only thinks they can sell what they have, but also finds a buyer willing to pay, is it really greedy to walk away from their current deal. It is not evil for content producers to want to get paid, nor is it evil of them to do business with people who want to pay them.

Search is already fragmented with plenty of sites indexing private article databases not available to Google, how is one more going to make that much of a difference?

I don't really buy the argument that either Microsoft or the content creators are 'evil' - yes it is only natural to want to be paid - but that doesn't mean that if it happens it won't be a bad thing.

On your second point - search is by no means as fragmented as this would result in it being. The specialised databases you speak of are just that, currently our expectation is that Google, Bing, et al all index the web we see on a day to day basis. Ideally those databases (if they are already in some form 'public') should be indexable by all search engines - it's the best thing for the consumer, and is pure competition on the technical front.