1.) Microsoft’s offer of $44.6 billion will be accepted by Yahoo shareholders this year (who cares what the board wants, it the shareholders that get to decide). By the way, IMHO, Yahoo isn’t worth it!

2.) The purchase will take 9 month to a full year to be approved because it has to go through both American and European Anti-Trust Regulators (with the Europeans giving M$ some serious hoops to jump through before its over).

3.) During this time, the best and brightest of Yahoo’s engineers/developers/execs/etc…, will leave the company before being absorbed into M$.

4.) Within 12 to 18 months after the purchase of Yahoo is final, yahoo.com and any other Yahoo service (i.e. Flickr,del.icio.us, etc..)referring to the name “A Yahoo Service” will be nothing but a faded memory and/or bad after taste in the mouths of consumers and M$ execs. There will be no YaSoft, or MicroHoo or any other evil hybrid of this hostile takeover. There will only be remnants what was once Yahoo coding scattered around whatever misguided online effort and poor branding M$ can come up with next. MSN, Live, etc.. it will all lead to nothing.

5.) Over 90+% of Yahoo technology utilizes LAMP or some combination thereof. Anyone who thinks M$ will continue to run Yahoo code on PHP/Linux/FreeBSD/Apache/MySQL and not port this code over to M$ services has obviously never heard of the story of “Hotmail”.

6.) Within 2 – 3 years, M$ will be right back where it started, being no real threat to Google’s AdSense, it will have carved out another 10% or so of market share of “online advertising” or whatever the popular nomenclature of the hour is.

7.) Microsoft becomes cash poor after this deal, and gets 15-25% of the online search market, and that’s it (that’s right, I expect Google’s market share to grow and M$’s to shrink after the inital 30% share post purchase). All for $40+ billion.

Conclusion: If I was an M$ shareholder, I’d be in SELL SELL SELL mode until I was clean and free of that nasty MSFT stock

Oh yeah, a footnote to this story.

Anybody else thinks its hilarious that Terry Semel stepped down and left Yahoo as Chairman of the Board yesterday, one day before M$ offer became public, with a consolation package of $500 million and a Street named after him. http://valleywag.com/351420/te.....-after-him

All of that after driving Yahoo into the giant garbage heap its now wallowing around in.

Guess it pays to be an admirer and friend to the Scientologists! http://www.dagnall.net/photo/b.....1-7478.jpg