02.01.08
Shoe Dropping
This morning, Microsoft publicly confirmed months of speculation by making an offer for Yahoo!. It is no secret that both Microsoft and Yahoo! are lagging in their efforts to compete with the Google in the search and online advertising spaces.
You can find more details about the proposed transaction elsewhere (finance.yahoo.com, bloomberg). One thing that most commenters will not consider is that Yahoo!’s infrastructure is built upon FreeBSD and other FLOSS, using open standards. When Microsoft bought Hotmail, which also used FreeBSD, it took quite a while for them to successfully transition to using Microsoft’s Windows Server platform. Hotmail’s users dealt with outages and flaky behavior. If Microsoft does succeed in buying Yahoo!, expect some quick changes in the appearance of Yahoo sites, followed by a longer period of transition.
I have no idea whether the merger will go through. Nor do I know whether Yahoo! still owns stock in Google (Yahoo! was an early investor in Google), which would tend to cause regulators to block the purchase.
