True, you’re not asking who likes who – but I couldn’t help myself from laughing and making silly voices with alterations of this sentence for at least five minutes (truly a crowd pleaser).

On a personal level, I always had a love-hate feeling for Y! (they do some right and some wrong, but at least they do no evil intentionally) while feeling G wants to share the web with the world (with a few tweaks to make a living from it [ok, a bit more than that, but still sharing and not being evil is part of the master plan]) and having a negative feeling towards most things M$ (even though I’m a master developer in a couple of languages and suites created by them)..

In an attempt to be neutral and fair, I thought about who would laugh the most about a deal, and actually I have a notion that MS would become the biggest losers in this deal. They want to swallow a company a quarter their size, which has the principle of being relaxed, open and open to suggestions, into the vast behemoth which is M$, a gray old thing which still has barely understood the principles of the Internet – a presence in any software area, never being satisfied before achieving total dominance and not really caring about what users want instead of simply looking for the fast dollar (did you noticed the value of that lately by the way?).

Furthermore, if MS swallows Y!, a multitude of the most innovative people at Y! will jump ship in disagreement, leaving only existing systems to adjust (which takes a lot longer without the people who thought them up) and no people left to innovate for the future which they were probably hoping to achieve.

MS, if you want success online in the way you have offline with your OS and Office Package, I suggest you analyze a bit more before you act, or you will keep trailing Google (or maybe you even have to give it up). Buying Y! is not the right move – the companies are too different and the move will take too long