Thread

According to CNBC, Microsoft is offering $31.00 per share or 0.9509 Microsoft stock for Yahoo.

“While a commercial partnership may have made sense at one time, Microsoft believes that the only alternative now is the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo that we are proposing,” Microsoft said in a letter to Yahoo shareholders.

I’m not really big on Yahoo! itself, but this still horrifies me, since I like Flickr.

As this is a part of Microsoft’s larger plan to try to make IIS a standard web platform, yes, it horrifies me.

Microsoft has, historically, done a great job of bloating/rebranding the things they buy. Also, they have horribly mismanaged their web strategy from day one. And considering their penchant for using Windows-only media formats that are not supported on other platforms except by third-party applications… And yes. IIS needs to die a violent death.

Please don’t assume that because I’m critical of Microsoft’s embrace-extend-eliminate strategies that being an Apple fanboy. I do prefer Apple computers, but when Microsoft does something (relatively) right, I’ll admit it, and support it. I <3 my Xbox360, or at least, I <3 the one I just got back, following my previous one’s red ring of doom.

IE8 doesn’t pass the acid2 test unless it is using yet another IE specific tag that tells IE8 to act in a standards-compliant way. If that tag is not there (because according to Microsoft, the DOCTYPE tag has been tainted by their older browsers lack of compliance), it continues to render in non-standard ways. That’s not better, it’s really more of the same.

Does anybody remember how awesome Hotmail was before Microsoft bought it? Have you seen the horror its become? What makes anybody think that Flickr would survive that fate. Further, what has MS ever bought and improved? There may be a really good answer to that question. Anybody?

Further, what has MS ever bought and improved? There may be a really good answer to that question. Anybody?

They’ve bought loathing and hatred and taken it to a new level 😉

Mark

Actually that should have been brought not bought but I think you get the idea! 😊

Mark

As this is a part of Microsoft’s larger plan to try to make IIS a standard web platform, yes, it horrifies me.

Could you elaborate on that?
Since apache is losing ground to IIS (and quickly), since Microsoft made IIS much better since IIS 5. And looking at Windows Server 2008 (modular OS), where you can disable the GUI all together and go hardcore command-line..IIS also has faster PHP execution since last version of IIS.

” In the January 2008 survey we received responses from 155,583,825 sites, reflecting a much slower growth of only 354 thousand sites, compared with last month, where the increase was 5.4 million.

Apache continues its recovery after steep falls in share over the last eighteen months and is back over 50%. Its share had been negatively affected over that period by the increasing number of blog sites in the survey on large providers like Microsoft and Google, using their own server software. But it is also benefiting from growth at other blog providers like multiply.

There has been significant growth in recent months for some newer entrants to the survey. While lighttpd’s share, particularly of active sites, has stagnated, there has been good growth for nginx (an open-source web server developed in Russia), which passes 0.5% of the web server market this month. There is also good growth for LiteSpeed, a commercial web server designed as a high-performance drop-in replacement for Apache, which passes 400,000 hostnames this month (partly due to its use by blogging provider WordPress.com.”

Quote sourced from Netcraft.com’s monthly web server survey.  IIS “taking over” share has more to do with single large providers handling single application setups, rather than massive numbers of web hosting providers switching to it as a platform.  Big difference powering a single environment you control, over the stability and usefulness of a product in a harder to control environment like general web hosting.  I would not implement Windows/IIS servers for my infrastructure if you paid me to.

Oh and on a side note here is a good article about this possibility back in November.

I like this little portion:

“Microsoft’s approach leads to such brand abominations as Windows Live Hotmail mail service. Do we dare think about the future of a Windows Live Yahoo Flickr Spaces personal photo sharing community service?”

Kind of off the subject but… Nevin, do you think Nginx could be helpful serving (pictures and static files) as a reverse proxy in front of Apache using EE?  Or do you think there would be little benefit after a good usage of caching?  I have a friend who gets dugg all the time and it kills his dedicated.  I suppose the fix would be an upgrade but I was just wondering what sage advice you might have.

I’m not going to comment in the Microsoft Vs. Yahoo theme, but didn’t Yahoo gobble up a lot of the things they offer, that were originally free open source projects, some for the better some for the worse?
The 44-billion offer is a little bit more “scratch” than the 1-B Sun paid for mySQL(i just double checked those figures).
I doubt it will have any great effect on my chicken-feed mutual funds :(