Microsoft and Yahoo?

The rumor of the day is that Microsoft will acquire Yahoo. That's certainly possible but John Gruber in Daring Fireball explains why that's a bad idea. "Most of the reaction I’ve seen regarding the rumor of a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo centers around the business aspects...But at a technical level, it would be quite a thing, because Yahoo’s software isn’t written using Microsoft technology."

He goes on to point out that MS is really the only large company left that creates all the software for their environment themselves, including the OS, compilers, tools, browsers, servers, databases, etc. Every other company uses open source for some if not most of these things. And certainly all web companies do.

This results in two things: First it's hard for MS to acquire web companies because the technical intgration is daunting. Second, most students learn open source these days, it's hard to move to an MS world. Still it is a large MS world and I'm not predicting MS's demise any time soon.