Exceptions

What would make the buy of Yahoo more unlikely is the fact that they are making use of open source rivals to Microsoft's technologies like PHP for many of their projects, as well as the company having a much more open policy on their projects in general where they've released their AJAX library under a permissive licence for instance.
This might well be what Microsoft needs to actually be able to seriously compete with Google but with their track-record thus far, I just can't see them adapting Yahoo's more open policies, so them buying it wouldn't really gain them anything that they'd have a use for, would it?

Re: Exceptions

There is more to MS buying Yahoo then their open platform or anything trivial that you mention.

MS would like to buy Yahoo because it would allow them to increase from a 5-10% search engine market share to a combined 15-25% share. The amount of money that is made from pay-per-click advertising on the search engine is in the billions of dollars. Nothing to sneeze at.

The combined company would also be able to reduce a lot of duplicate research. Think live maps/yahoo maps, search engine algorithms, crawling engine, etc.

Yahoo also has a very powerful portal which MS would leverage much like msn.com to promote it's programs and web services. Yahoo Mail is the largest web mail and in my opinion one of the nicest web mail interfaces around. This would be a big step up from Live mail which has consistantly been behind in storage, usability and users. The mail portal is another place where advertising revenue is generated as well as keeping users on your servers.

As far as Yahoo's open policy MS could go one of two ways. They could either stop updating the AJAX release and let it die off or they could update it to use their new technology. MS is trying to promote Silverlight as a viable alternative to flash as well as a the core of a web 3.0. The beauty of Silverlight is that it can use almost any back end programming language so Yahoo could continue to use PHP and just connect that to the Silverlight front end framework and immediatly give Silverlight a HUGE install base. Consider how many millions of people go to the Yahoo portal and imagine all of them installing Silverlight and being impressed with some new functionality it gives. I have seen some very impressive Silverlight demonstrations and can tell you that with some smart programmers and help from the creators they could make an even more advanced portal.

F* that

I've been buying logitech products for years. I've been telling firends and clients to get logitech keyboards, mice, speakers, universal remotes. I dread walking into an office for a keyboard complaint and finding its a Microsuck keyboard. If they ended up buying logitech, I'd never get another logitech anything.