Friday, February 1, 2008

Microsoft bids to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion

I just heard this morning that Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo.

This deal is focused on generating more advertising dollars, but what really intrigues me are the possibilities with Yahoo's and Microsoft's services intertwining if the deal goes through.

I use Google as my main search engine. I barely use Yahoo or MSN for search, but I do use their other services.

Microsoft's Live Search does have an amazing Birds Eye view of maps that Google Maps can't even touch.

I can't live without the Yahoo-owned Delicious service for social bookmarking and I just signed up for Flickr Pro for photo sharing.

Microsoft has been slow to adapt Microsoft Office to the Web 2.0 world of online document editing and cloud computing, while Google Docs and Zoho Office have been offering online word processing and spreadsheets.

I wonder if Microsoft could integrate Yahoo's web services into the next version of Windows and make the successor to IE7 more Web 2.0 friendly? Making the OS more seamless with web services would be cool, especially if greater security and support were included.

All I ask for is that Microsoft does not add new annoying features to Yahoo.