[jeremiah]

I think you are absolutely right about pleasing the stakeholders, especially because good engineers are hard to find and if the engineers leave en masse, there will be problems.

I see the culture of the two companies as incompatible. Yahoo! is a FreeBSD shop, they use lots of Free Software, MySQL, etc. Is Microsoft going to rip and replace all those servers? If they don't, they are saying FreeBSD and Free Software is better than Windows. I see this problem as being a very expensive issue.

Secondly, Microsoft has never borrowed money before to purchase a company. They were having Bear Stearns help them with this purchase, and while Bear Stearns is gone, they still will need some serious capital and will go into debt. This will change their culture, their ability to attract investors, and the bottom line.

[ideas101]

the cultural clash, the technology clash, the reputation clash will cost ms dearly ... also employees who dont leave will stay there with the lowest moral which is even more dangerous than an employee leaving the company ... this will also create internal politics about who's right regarding selecting a technology and/or new apps and business.

Anyway this would be fun to watch as 2 different giant animals (dinosaur and elephant) coming together to rule the jungle - while all the other animals like lions, tigers, leopards will try to create an even game to ouster these giants.

[okeumeni]

I do not think MS will attempt to merge teams and technologies; they are smarter than that, not at least for a mid term. I think they will basically run two companies and go for the main prize: ads base customers and search traffic. They will keep both engines separate for a while and consolidate the ads business in general into a giant force in revenue making; this will be the main problem for Google.