Comments on: Open-source silver lining in Microsoft's $44.6 billion wedding vow to Yahoo?

What are the open-source implications, if the software giant is successful in acquiring Yahoo? Matt Asay offers his opinion.

[Rusty Digital Marketing]

YaSoft! Good. MicroHoo! Bad

There are enormous synergies in this merger, and many benefits for advertisers.

Yahoo! has a strong consumer franchise, and technically very strong search and advertising match capabilities.

Yahoo! is let down by unfriendly and inefficient processes and services for its advertisers, however, which is why it generates advertising revenues, but is not great at generating good profits.

Digital Marketing blog - YaSoft! or MicroHoo! ?

[JCPayne]

A lot of people use Yahoo because it is NOT AOL or Microsoft... I will leave if Microsoft steps in...

Verizon or AT&T would be a better deal.... Or Google buying out Yahoo now that would be a sweet deal.....

Verizon and AT&T use Yahoo to power their Internet services so they would win-ut in a buy of Yahooo. Esp. Verizon which is rolling out FiOS and could use Yahoo as a nice content backend for their Fiber optics service.... Yahoo would be a sweeet content deal for Verizon.....

[Danathar]

It's hard to see Microsoft embracing open source. It goes against their DNA as a corporate entity. It's more likely MS would kill or sell off the open source parts.

But, let's not forget that depending on the license of the open source project Microsoft may not be able to kill all of it even if they wanted to.

[Matt Asay]

@Danathar: Bingo! This is what I was getting at in my Jekyll and Hyde post the other day. Open source protects us against our worst intentions. Open source may live on at Yahoo! regardless of Microsoft's good or bad intentions. It's the beauty of copyleft.

[lmasanti]

As for open source in Yahoo!... remember HotMail.
They ended convering everything to MS.

[dmhallman]

Not long ago Microsoft was positioning msn.com to try to take market share from yahoo.com. The web responded as Terry Semel has now. But look at the outcome. The truth is between yahoo.com, msn.com, live.com, Xbox live, OneCare, Office, facebook (through investment) and Windows (in their many versions) Microsoft has a HUGE audience and influance over how consumer experiences and habits are formed. If this goes through it is a whole new ballgame.

[seanupton]

Matt - see Ballmer's letter to the Yahoo board.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/feb/01/microsoft.microsoft?gusrc=rss&feed=technology

"Consolidating capital spending" means axing a lot of Yahoo R&D. When Ballmer says "single search index" that means he might axe the Hadoop folks and focus R&D on the Norwegian company they just acquired. What this does is provide a good deal to shareholders, but it creates a diaspora of smart folks to create the next round of open-source startups, no?

[crodseth]

The notion that a Microsoft / Yahoo merger will open Microsoft's proprietary software vault is absurd, to say the least.

[billxa]

What to market values is information, automation, and productivity. The market is finding more and more that it gets that value from means other than buying, deploying, and managing Microsoft software. More and more of this value comes from more efficient web accessible models, more and more of which are powered not by Microsoft but by open source. If Microsoft sees this as a defensive play, as way to keep software dominance by having software they produce and own power these web accessible models, they will lose. If they see is as a necessary offensive play, to much more aggressively move into delivering value to the market through web accessible models, and as a means of shifting their culture to embrace the emerging new model, then they will embrace powered by open source as well, because their gain comes from delivering information, access, automation, and productivity to the market, not from owning and selling software. I personally think they get it (at least at the top). Change or die. They have to be bold to make change happen. This is a bold move, and one that I believe is good for open innovation. Bill Miller, xaware.org

[pqdina]

I think Yahoo-Microsoft combination may be a great press to Google.

My interesting story.

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