If Microsoft were to purchase Yahoo! this would NOT be a good thing from a technical perspective. I work as a systems consultant and understand the technology that both companies have implemented to present their respective content. The difference would present many technical issues in integrating Yahoo! services in with Microsoft's plan for online content. Also understanding the Yahoo! community many of them, including staff, would defect to Google. I believe this is the key reason a deal has not been made yet, the difference in companies' cultures and philosophies are vastly different and I believe would spell disaster.
Also, there are many subscribers who use multiple email services (I for 1 and a number of friends)and who choose Yahoo! or Google for their 'good' email and who use Hotmail/MSN for junkmail or an email address to give up for getting free stuff.
From an investor perspective this could be a good thing... initially. Anyone who owned a little Yahoo! could cash out pretty nice. The bigger question is what would happen to all the online Yahoo! apps? What would happen to the community? What about all the technical staff?
I believe some of the apps could go away due to Microsoft not seeing value in them, perhaps technical reasons also. Most of Yahoo is built on Linux and BSD; anyone remember when Microsoft purchased Hotmail??? Hotmail used to run on all BSD systems and the migration to .NET (.NET framework , VB.NET, C# was created for these online services initially) wasn't the smoothest.
I also think most of their good technical staff would leave as the cultures are vastly different as well as some of the more 'religious' techys would for sure leave. Some of the community would defect to Google as these people would have various issues why not to continue. They could range from simply not trusting Microsoft to the migration issues.
Personally, I would stop using my Yahoo! account as a 'good' email address and begin using it for junk mail/subscriptions as well as some of it's other services. After having Microsoft delete all my email from my Hotmail account and hearing a number of friend's MSN accounts broken/hacked into I have little trust in them. If it wasn't for these last items I would cut them some slack but I do not trust the deal.
