Microsoft attempts to buy Yahoo! and Google reacts

[matgb]

Official Google Blog: Yahoo! and the future of the Internet:

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC?

Interesting times it seems. Can that be read as anything other than "gloves off, come on then"?

Comments

[paulgregory.livejournal.com]

Yahoo! own lots of stuff that's good but not obviously profitable like del.icio.us (presumably ctrl-alt-del.icio.us post merger). And indeed, their user count doesn't seem to be helping their share price.

Also, Yahoo! have tie-ups with Apple - the Stocks and Weather apps on the iPhone/touch are powered by Yahoo! (and are both shite). But of course Apple stores sell MS Office For Mac, so it's not like MS are purely about Windows.

Expanding Microsoft's support for open source stuff is possibly a good counter-argument to any regulatory concerns about Windows.

I dunno. I get the feeling Microsoft isn't the company it was 10 years ago, and this seems a good chance to prove it.

[matgb]

presumably ctrl-alt-del.icio.us post merger

That was bad. That was REALLY bad.

But yeah, there's hope that MS might be moving the right way, either through seeing the light or customer demand, matters not which really. It's just the concerns over their stuff which I do use, like delicious—MS really messed up Hotmail, and while they may have learnt, can they really afford to have major services run on competing OS server stuff?