waffle

I would say that it won’t happen, but there’s money involved above stock levels. It could happen. What if it does happen? It won’t work.

It won’t work because of the complete clash of corporate culture. People at Microsoft and Yahoo! on overlapping departments are reconsidering their positions as we speak. Sure, they share the same global computer network, inklings of IM federation and a penchant for crowded portal web sites, but almost any Yahoo! property is useless to Microsoft or already duplicated. That’s a whole lot of stiffs to lay off, and a lot of money to spend for, essentially, Flickr.

It won’t work because of the complete clash of technology. Accelerated PHP for almost all of Yahoo! (bar del.icio.us, which runs on Perl — Mason to be specific) is just not easily convertible to a Microsoft environment, unless they plan to just run it on their own IIS FastCGI extension.

It won’t work because it doesn’t make sense. What does Yahoo! have that Microsoft could possibly want? If you’re guessing “a search engine”; guess what — Microsoft just said they’d buy FAST, a smaller and cheaper transfer which is more likely to pass, leaves them with less residual products and actually probably a better search engine. The only way this could possibly make sense is if they wanted a lot of people to own some sort of Microsoft Passport again, which sort of makes sense given their foolish Facebook investment last year.

It won’t work. Trust me.