Ozzie on Microhoo integration: Not so fast

Microsoft may be in a hurry to acquire Yahoo's advertising revenue, but it won't rush to merge its computing systems with Yahoo's after a potential merger, according to a top executive.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect, told the Financial Times that the company would take a long, hard look before attempting any integration of technologies.

"Technology companies, if they dive in and just smash things together for smashing-them-together's sake, it's reckless, it's just simply reckless," Ozzie told the FT in a story published on Sunday.

At last week's Mix '08 conference in Las Vegas, Ozzie talked about Microsoft's efforts to build a "seamless mesh" computing infrastructure that will be more aware of mobile devices and online applications.

As our own Dan Farber put it last week, reporting from Ozzie's Mix keynote: "Ultimately, the 'mesh' requires an overhaul of the back end to support utility computing on a grand scale. In addition, applications need to be 'refactored,' Ozzie said."

That refactoring may need to extend to a range of open source-based applications within Yahoo that Microsoft will need to tackle before it can fully realize the benefits of any merger.

Ozzie may have made an oblique reference to that challenge in his Mix keynote: "And then there's Yahoo...I can say it's already added some interesting twists to what promises to be a really, really exciting year," he said.

Microsoft may have already begun to help itself in this integration challenge. Last month, the company launched a broad interoperability strategy to better link to open-source software and other non-Microsoft technologies.

News.com's Stephen Shankland underlined the significance of that move, in light of the Yahoo bid. "The third, and perhaps strongest reason, is that open-source software has become a powerful force in the software industry and customer sites--and even at Yahoo, the Internet company Microsoft is trying to acquire for $44.6 billion in part because of its engineering expertise."

Last week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that the company would likely keep some of the open-source PHP applications that Yahoo relies on for its services and attempt to mix-and-match them with Microsoft's platforms. "We should not have two of everything. We'll have to sort some of that through," he said.

[Penguinisto]

Lesson learned from Hotmail?

I remember when they tried to flop Hotmail's old FreeBSD
servers to NT - it was a royal mess, and they quickly had to
switch back. Took 'em years to rig Windows to handle it (I
personally think that they were finally able to do it thanks to
Moore's Law).

Little wonder that they're in no hurry to slam over Yahoo's server
farms (technically, I doubt they'd be capable of doing it anytime
soon anyway).

It also doesn't hurt that they're really trying to reassure the
Yahoo crowd that if they buy the thing, they won't immediately
blow it up (like they did Hotmail).

'course, they'll lose a huge chunk of Yahoo's userbase anyway
(Passport? Blecch), but that's (yet) neither here nor there.

/P

[g15host]

Best Way To Learn

...how open source infrastructures work for MS is to buy it. MS has money. If it really wants to set up the world's biggest server farms it obvious can - or can it, based on current Windows architecture? That's the question not being asked aloud. Everyone knows Google runs on its own tweaked Linux OS. To compete with Unix servers at one time Windows had to go from 3.1 to NT. Beyond the next version of Windows in the works, we might be looking at a necessary evolution to upscale the Windows OS again to a higher level, provided that the next phase of network revoltuion and virtualizaion technology don't make the current concept of an operating system obsolete before then. If MS really acquires Yahoo it will be an enormous challenge. It's good to see that they are willing to take it on. I give them credit for that.

[ChrisLang]

What about DKIM?

What about (DKIM Domain Keys Identified Mail)? Right now it is supposed to be portable, depending on the domain of the sender rather that the IP address of the email server (SPF and Sender ID.

If MS buys Y! I am guessing this would bring about a merger of Sender ID and DKIM ending the promise of domain portability.

I wrote a blog post weeks ago on this at my site: http://www.keywebdata.com/?p=48 (comments welcome).

Also I agree with the prior post in this way. How can MS say they are interested in the data centers when MS runs on PC based servers that run MS server 2003 (and above) and Yahoo runs on Unix?

Google gets 62% of all organic searchs worldwide. The rest is left to Yahoo and MSN.

Google Sites 62.4, Yahoo! 12.8, Baidu.com (japan) 5.2, Microsoft Sites 2.9, eBay 2.2.

Aquiring Yahoo to cover more of the orginc search market and does not jive either.