It's difficult to imagine a Microsoft takeover of Yahoo.

Yahoo is a creature of the Internet, born of the Unix-based technologies that most Internet people started with. The crusty Unix guys Yahoo hires will not take well to the Windows interlopers coming in and insisting they use Visual Studio instead of Python.

At this very moment I am picturing these wizards cleaning out their desks, polishing their resumes and calling up their favorite headhunters. Fortunately, from what I understand the Valley still has a serious talent shortage, so they will no doubt vanish quickly, leaving Yahoo's technical departments as an empty shell.

Takeovers rarely if ever accomplish what they are supposed to. Daimler-Benz swallowed Chrysler only to regurgitate it a few years later, and that's just the latest of thousands of takeovers gone wrong. For a takeover to have any reasonable chance of success, you have to have compatible corporate cultures. Internet people managing Internet people, Unix people managing Unix people, that can work. Packaged software people managing Internet people, Windows people managing Unix people, that's extremely unlikely to come out well.

You heard it here: If this merger happens, it will destroy Yahoo and all the value it contains. And this is probably the intent - it will cause Yahoo to disappear as a competitor, and anyone who wants to avoid Google will turn to MSN.

But then there will be a lot of Yahoo engineers out there looking for something to do ... don't be surprised if this means a new Yahoo will appear from the ashes, and Microsoft will have blown $45 billion on ... precisely nothing.

What are your thoughts?

D

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