01 February 2008

MS-Yow!, not MS-Yahoo! for Open Source

The Microsoft-Yahoo merger meme has been out and about for ages. It's not hard to see why Microsoft finally decided to jump: the decline in Yahoo's share price has been pretty precipitous in the last three months, and it's obviously reached a too-good-to-refuse level.

And I have to say that were I in Microsoft's position, I'd do the same: the fit looks good, and it would give the company a chance of fighting back against Google - something that looks hopeless, currently.

But as I wrote when I considered this idea last year, I have this feeling that if the deal goes through, Microsoft won't be looking very kindly on the open source software that Yahoo owns - such as Zimbra - or uses - like MySQL.

Why not? Well, one of the areas where Microsoft is getting whupped by free software is in top-end clusters. Moreover, the open source world continually throws in its face that Google, the very acme of computer power, runs on GNU/Linux, albeit a customised version. So what better way to show that Windows is fully the equal of the latter for extreme computing conditions than to turn Yahoo into a high-profile advertisement for the power of Windows (and SQLServer) on clusters?

To be sure, that would be more expensive than sticking with Yahoo's current choices, but Microsoft is playing for high stakes, and willing to gamble accordingly - as this $45 billion proposed acquisition of Yahoo demonstrates only too clearly.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

OK....but could you really run Yahoo on Windows & SQL Sever? A lot of techs I know say NO. Google will send them roses if they try to do this.

Glyn Moody said...

I'm sure you couldn't now, but that's the point: Microsoft excels at iterating from a position of weakness - think Windows, IE, well, just about everything.

Imagine Ballmer saying to his boys and girls: you are going to do this, and you've n months to do it. It would certainly be motivating....

And I don't think Microsoft has much to lose: Yahoo is getting trounced by Google anyway. But the potential upside is big.