erid...@gmail.com

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/01/microsoft.news

The above url leads to an article that makes a case for the Microsoft-
Yahoo takeover (if it pans out) actually playing to Google's benefit.
The technologies employed by MS and Yahoo for their respective
internet services are orthogonal and cannot be easily integrates, if
at all.  Here is a snippet from the article:

"Crunching those two organisations together seamlessly would be like
trying to shuffle a 50ft-high pack of cards without dropping any. And
the problems start right at the bottom. Yahoo's servers, answering
billions of page requests every day, use a web system called PHP to
generate customised pages. Microsoft doesn't like PHP, which is free
and has a licence that obliges people to release any changes they make
to it back into the community.

Microsoft prefers its own web system, called ASP, to build web pages,
and that's what it uses on Windows Live, its online equivalent of
Yahoo.

Integrating Yahoo into Microsoft would mean either tearing out PHP and
replacing it with ASP, a huge project that would be enormously
expensive while bringing no visible benefit to users, or require
Microsoft to accept an open source product deep within its new
property. Neither is palatable; if Microsoft dogma is followed, it
will throw out PHP. Watch out for the reliability of Yahoo if it does.

Take the giant part of Yahoo, its mail servers. Those run on a free,
open source operating system called FreeBSD. Microsoft Live's mail
servers run on Windows, of course.

If Yahoo swapped from FreeBSD to Windows, the licensing costs would be
enormous. Obviously, Microsoft will find a way around that. But the
underlying problem is that this migration from one platform to another
is the sort of task that gives chief information officers sleepless
nights and ulcers. Interestingly, Microsoft did exactly this with
Hotmail in summer 2000. Can it repeat the trick in 2008-09? Again,
watch out for the reliability of your systems. And this would have to
be repeated again and again across Yahoo's sprawling mass of content
and pages; in many cases, it would be more sensible for Microsoft to
dump its own offerings (on, say, stocks, where Yahoo's finance pages
beat Microsoft's hands down).

Still, one company may benefit from Microsoft attempting to shoehorn
Yahoo into itself. Google will be able to offer a web-leading home to
top developers who like open source. Just remember this five years
from now: most mergers fail."

Thoughtful comments?  The author presents a number of concrete points
that Microsoft didn't address in its bear-hug announcement.