Okay... I know I've gotten other posts to put up but I had to comment on this while it's fresh.

Microsoft have bid $44.6bn to take over Yahoo from it's share holders this Friday and it's all over the news.

Their proposed aim in this take-over? "Today this market is increasingly dominated by one player. Together, Microsoft and Yahoo! can offer a competitive choice while better fulfilling the needs of customers and partners" Everyone is pointing to the "dominated by one player" part as being a reference to Googles recent acquisitions of DoubleClick and the Googlesyndication advertising ring, AdSense and AdWords Google Analytics... which actually benefits Googles search database as well... hence why a Google search is far more relevant than a Yahoo one in most cases.

TBH, I was a big Excite fan... I flowed easily to AltaVista, but haven't used them over Google in some considerable time... largely because they now use the Yahoo engine and database... why Yahoo still keep the AltaVista page I'm not entirely sure. I used to use AllTheWeb... but in all honesty, their database has become seriously out-of-date, and the specific FTP and Gopher searches are no longer available in the usable way they used to be. So Google is in-deed the only real player in the Search engine field. Microsoft's Live! search out strips a Yahoo search (IMHO) and their HotBot is nearly as good as a DogPile search. So what do they think Yahoo will gain them over Google?

Let's look at the three companies side by side, to see what they offer:-

Yup... I used a Google Sheet. Well, I still don't even have the Beta of Office Live! I am promised... so...

So... from this we can see that Microsoft would gain only 6 points in competition with Google. They could also gain 10 services that they don't currently have, and neither do Google. However, we could potentially loose 34 services from Yahoo, which Microsoft already have.

Looking more closely, Microsoft has always been keen to leave Avatars to others... so I think they will just kill that if they take over Yahoo. I don't really see why they'd want Yahoo Notes, unless they want to expand Live! Lists. Advanced searches are not really in their interest, as narrowing your search criteria narrows their ability to throw marketing at you, and on that point, Microsoft are not very good at marketing anyone but Microsoft. I don't think they will pick up all the companies who currently place Ads with Yahoo, because they probably go to Yahoo because they are Microsoft and / or Google competitors. Microsoft's Live! search technology, while no Google or Spotlight, is as good, if not better than Yahoos' engine so they can't want that, and we should also remember that we will be loosing AltaVista as well as Yahoo.

If we loose Yahoo, we loose Yahoo Widgets, (formally Konfabulator) which spawned Apples Dashboard Widgets... and for what? That code can't be re-used in Vista Side Bar or Live! Gadgets. It's Java not .NET / Avalon / WPF.

If Microsoft want any of that lot... It's probably Yahoos mobile technology (but IMHO their market placing would kill it, even it they had it) and Bable Fish. There was a time when Bable Fish was a huge asset on the Web... now it has many competitors, and some are based on considerably better (faster and more accurate) engines than Bable.

I can't see MS carrying on with GeoCities, and Bill Gates recent philanthropy aside, if MS wanted a Microsoft for Good they could do it without buying Yahoo.

No... I don't think this is about increasing consumer quality and choice. I don't think it's about Microsoft beating Google, or even Google beating Microsoft. It's about Microsoft kicking Yahoo while they are down. It's about one less competitor for Microsoft.

Oddly enough... I think it could well become more about one less competitor for Google, which will place Google in an even better position to make Microsoft's strangle hold on PCs irrelevant.

If Microsoft wanted to go up against Google, they should start selling Microsoft Linux, buy out ThinkFree Office, SlideShare and or Wordsmith. They should stop working on Silverlight and concentrate on technologies closer to AJAX and XUL, which can operate across multiple platforms.

I know Microsoft have this mind set, that if it's not Windows only it needs to be bought out, and versions for other platforms killed off, or just stamped on till it dies, but the Web is changing how we look at applications. It really won't matter if you're using a Windows, Linux, Apple, BSD, Sun, X-Box or Playstation to use your applications... just so long as they can get on line and run Web 2.0 XHTML, AJAX, Java, JavaScript and Flash.

MS Office will not stand up to that, unless it steps up to it. Windows will not last in it's present incarnations... not even Vista. Linux' Wine and ReactOS are already more compatible with legacy Win32 applications than 64-bit versions of Windows. In Wines case, even on 64 bit versions of Linux or BSD. .NET is an arse when compared with present Sun offerings and delight the Mono Open Source cross platform equivalents, it's just doesn't port as easily or as well. WPF and IE7 are too little too late.

Yes, I use Windows XP. I own Vista, but I don't use it. I don't see the point in using it, as opposed to SUSE, PC-BSD or MacOS. If I had the cash or I could freely run it on any hardware, I'd use MacOS. I can run both Wine and Windows XP proper, and get all the benefits of true Unix and Mac only applications. Oh yea, and IEEE1394 works properly with ease without having to boot the thing and keep winding tapes back and forth and rebooting the computer just to remove a drive with a filesystem that isn't 30 years old. If I wanted the best value for money modern OS I would probably use Ubuntu or PC-BSD.

The stand-alone Desktop PC is becoming as irrelevant as the Mainframe computer, at which point, your choice of OS, and your choice of browser becomes just that... your choice. It makes little or no difference, in the long run, with your use of the computer / terminal. The applications you use, the things you do, games you play etc will all have to be on-line services designed to fit any box (with sufficient processing power and audio visual capabilities and user input) you care to connect with.

Even after the beating Sun took from Microsoft over the Java court cases, I think Sun (especially after their recent acquisition of mySQL, and the prolific use of OpenOffice on any non-Windows platform) and Google with their cross-platform in-browser technology and well known brand are far better suited to be a threat to MS than Yahoo, who are simply a service provide lightening the Microsoft server and competition load. To kill off (buy out) Yahoo is somewhat political suicide IMHO. It gains them little and looses them a fair chunk of a market they need to move to, if they are to continue their success story.

I wouldn't normally mind the idea of Microsoft going down the swanny, but taking user choices for the future with them is offensive to me in the extreme. And in all honesty... this new emerging market they need to move to, is one I think they are well positioned to server users well in. One I would like to see them succeed at, but one which I think they are going about entirely the wrong way.

I can only urge Yahoo shareholders not to take this offer. For the sake of Yahoo, the sake of Microsoft, and the sake of the Internet community. I also urge users of the Internet to take up in Yahoos defense, should they defy the man from MS publicly.

Okay. Rant over. Please feel free to comment.