Microsoft offers $44.6-Billion for Yahoo

This announcement did not leave me with a warm and fuzzy feeling. Right now there are really only three big search engines, with Google being the dominate one; this would narrow it down to two. Whenever Microsoft can’t get something right, they just buy someone who has done it right.

There is a very interesting discussion on Slashdot about why Yahoo is so popular. A lot of the reasons for it’s popularity are things that Microsoft has never really understood, like interoperability. How many of Microsoft’s offerings fail to work properly on anything but a MS platform?

I see the Internet moving away from propriety software solutions. For a long time Internet Explorer was king, but that is all changing, and as web usage moves more and more towards handhelds I don’t see this trend changing. We have this thing called “Web Standards”, and they work.

If this deal goes through, I just hope Yahoo doesn’t end up like Hotmail. For me, Google is king, but I like Yahoo the way it is and would hate to see it become an IE only, or even IE enhanced platform.