

Monkey Boy's three-legged race - neilc
http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2008/02/ballmer-im-completely-out-of-ideas.html

======
marcus
For this deal to have any kind of upside for Microsoft, they need to focus
their energies on combining their search technologies and their AdWords
technology and ignore everything else, let the existing Yahoo org run it.

Don't waste your efforts on branding, don't waste your efforts on trying to
consolidate your data centers, keep your eye on the ball.

------
Tichy
I think people are making too much of a fuss about this. MS and Yahoo are both
big corporations, they won't be that different internally.

~~~
allenbrunson
ahem. remember when microsoft bought hotmail? they converted it from using a
bunch of unixy technologies to their own ms-flavored stuff.

yahoo is once again mostly powered by unixy stuff, but they've surely got
several orders of magnitude more code and infrastructure than hotmail did.

sounds to me like the irresistable force meeting the immovable object.

~~~
Tichy
I don't know, was Hotmail a billion dollar company with thousands of employees
and thousands of servers? If not, maybe there is no point in drawing
analogies.

I don't think MS wants to buy Yahoo for an opportunity to convert another
server farm to Windows. Maybe they will convert, maybe they won't, but that is
not really the most interesting aspect of the whole thing. Does it really make
that much of a difference, anyway? The actual web servers and databases are
available for both Linux and Unix, so application developers should not feel a
difference. The rest is for the system admins to figure out.

Personally, I expect MS to switch to Linux eventually (might be a couple of
years still). They did good research in User Interface design, which could
come in handy for designing a fancy Gnome skin. With falling hardware prices,
it seems difficult to sell Operating Systems in the future.

~~~
allenbrunson
i think you're underestimating the importance of the underlying technology. my
job is mostly writing linux programs on a mac. if my boss came to me today and
told me that my new job is writing windows server apps on a windows pc, i'd be
looking for another job. i'd be willing to bet that a whole lot of yahoo
engineers feel the same way.

and personally, i think microsoft would sooner die than switch to unix. i
can't see them giving up like that.

if the situation gets really rough and they're finally forced to do something
drastic, i think it would be writing a brand-new-from-scratch operating
system, which would allow them to ditch 20-plus-years of legacy apps and APIs,
the main thing that's holding them back. if they were to do that, i might
actually get interested in them again.

~~~
Tichy
What do you mean by server apps? Maybe I am living in fantasy land, because I
was a Java developer most of the time, but I couldn't care less if my web
applications run on Linux., OS X or Windows, if the system admin can ensure me
that it is secure (or at least takes the responsibility for it). And all other
web development languages, Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP and so on are all available
for Windows, too, so where is the problem?

Does Yahoo have any other desktop applications besides the useless messenger?
If not, then everything else is web applications, so most of their engineers
should be fine. Only the sysadmins might be in trouble, IF MS decides to
switch over to Windows servers anyway.

I know MS switching to Linux seems unlikely, but wouldn't it be cool? ;-)

I just don't think that MS are the evil empire most people seem to make them
out to be. They solved some really hard software problems, that for example
Apple never had to solve (hardware compatibility). They really did useful
research in usability. They never were a monopoly. And they made some bad
design decisions, but to their defense, a few years ago security wasn't the
big topic that it is today. I can't think of an excuse for Vista, though.

Personally, I also use Linux, btw., I am definitely not a MS fanboy.

~~~
allenbrunson
sigh. i'm tired of trying to explain this. anybody else want to step in here?

~~~
Tichy
Well you could explain what you mean by server apps, maybe then I could
understand you?

