Bloggin' the web, one post at a time

Microsoft bids on Yahoo

Yes, I can’t believe it either, it’s happened, it’s real, it’s not a dream. Microsoft is offering Yahoo shareholders $44.6 billion to buy them out. The offer is tempting because it’s way more than Yahoo currently is worth. Now, you may also be wondering why do I care.

2008-02-01 / 03:34

2 Comments

By Alphast
02/01/2008 05:20 PM
Rotterdam
Well, as usual in this kind of massive deal, the devil (for the users) will be in the details. If (and I know this is a massive one) MS people decide to go a bit clever at it, they could try to genuinely give users the best of both worlds. Let's imagine an offer where MSN and Yahoo Messenger are merged with the best of both solutions only (like getting rid of the stupid .NET validation, for instance). That's already interesting, isn't it? Then we can go along the rest as well: Yahoo users could merge with their Windows Live account (ok, I fail to see what is best in both solutions... ;-) )... Though Yahoo groups and My Yahoo could be a nice add on to W Live. And replacing Hotmail with YahooMail would be a massive improvement. For Hotmail users mainly... To be honest, the only thing I really fail to see in this whole story is what is the advantage for Yahoo's faithful customers.
By Egor Kloos
02/01/2008 05:37 PM
Rotterdam, The Netherlands, Europe, Earth etc...
Yahoo is also in the process of adding OpenID support to their web applications. This, for better or worse, is a major step towards universal registration/signup.
But it's true that what Yahoo is good at Microsoft is bad at. As long as Microsoft doesn't do their borg party trick we may see open source thrive within alongside Microsoft.
Commenting is not available in this channel entry.