Microsoft's possible buyout of Yahoo?

I think this is a good idea. Yahoo's old news, and in my opinion needs something like Microsoft to push them along. I don't think the two would ever beat out Google, but it's pathetic how Yahoo are trying to avoid it. If they keep going this way in the next couple of years they could totally bust. I haven't seen/heard of anyone even searching at Yahoo in like...3 years...I think. At least MSN is defaulted with Internet Explorer, so sometimes you might get a couple of mistaken searches with that. Yahoo's just fucked. And am I the only one to think that Yahoo has made the most annoying Toolbar ever? The only good thing about them is their IM Client, but even then, they allowed Live/Yahoo interconnectivity, so I just end up using Live anyways!

What do you guys think? I think it's not the greatest thing for Yahoo but it's something they need to do before they totally run out of options. I don't think they have many options left. And did you guys hear about Yahoo starting up Buzz? I don't think that's going to get anywhere.

Hmm, I have both an MSN e-mail account and a Yahoo one. Interesting.

Microsoft products are a part of most people's lives these days. Their operating systems have been used by the majority for many years, and their software running on these systems as well.

Users of Mac, Linux, Solaris or whatever, are still a minority, and are a long way from mainstream acceptance (although the Carrefour -the French supermarket- near my home sells laptops with a linux system installed).

Do I mind if Yahoo! is bought by Microsoft? Meh, it won't have a profound impact in my life, I think. I have a Yahoo! e-mail account, basically for websites of which I'm not 100% sure I'll frequently use whatever service they provide and that ask for my e-mail address (so it's basically a spam catcher). I know a few people on Yahoo! messenger, and I've already used the Yahoo search function twice this year (mainly because the Google image search frequently displays 'broken image' placeholders here).

Competition is good. Yahoo and Hotmail have increased the per-user size of mailboxes to 5 GB (at least, this goes for Hotmail), after Gmail came with nice 'wee, I just archive my e-mail and forget about it' mailboxes. But Yahoo, or at least as far as my use of it is concerned, hasn't come with anything groundbreaking recently, so I guess in that aspect, I don't mind if it's taken over by Microsoft.

Microsoft is growing and is far from stopping to do so, and will this eventually be dangerous (in whatever way you wish to place an image to accompany the word 'dangerous')? It just makes me hope that man is far away from AI, which would be dangerous technology in the hand of just one company (and it does seem that Microsoft is trying hard to be the single dominator).

As long as Yahoo auctions will stay the way they are, I couldn't care less.

I've seen it before - when Microsoft can't beat the market leader at their own game they buy an also-ran and make them the system default.
If this buyout goes ahead Google are going to be sucker-punched!

GreyGhost said:

If this buyout goes ahead Google are going to be sucker-punched!

If this buyout goes ahead Google isn't going to even flinch. The only way to beat Google is to come up with your own innovative, working and useful services, not by mimicking Google.

Of course, that Microsoft is trying to get a foothold on every possible IT market is stupid in itself. They should just concentrate on software and try to do that one thing well.

scorpion said:
It just makes me hope that man is far away from AI, which would be dangerous technology in the hand of just one company (and it does seem that Microsoft is trying hard to be the single dominator).

They might not be using AI yet, but they're ready to use "system monitoring" on employees. I can see them adding that technology especially to the offshore exploitative operations they prefer for cost reduction.