I see that Microsoft has put in a bid of 44 Billion to purchase Yahoo! I have a couple issues with this, and it's not all about my dislike for Microsoft. It's more to do with the fact that I like how Yahoo! supports developing sites that work across platforms and browsers. Yahoo! Mail works nicely, although I did just ditch my pro account with Yahoo! because I have been in the process of switching over to GMail. Yahoo has some great engineers and developers that have developed their YUI (Yahoo User Interface) tools. These tools allow web developers to create sites that have a rich interface, without having to come up with all the javascript. I also like Flickr, which is where I store my photographs. It has a great interface, and uses Flash and Flex a lot where they really need the slick interface. They are also big on using Free BSD and PHP. If Microsoft purchases them I have the feeling that a lot of this will change, which would suck. When Microsoft bought Hotmail a lot of the users at the time left, because like most products they buy, it gets worse afterward. I can already see all the Flash being replaced with Silverlight, and sites suddenly working better on Windows with Internet Explorer for all the extra goodies. I hope I am wrong that all this would occur, but this is Microsoft we're talking about, so it's not very far fetched.

Tags: microsoft, yahoo