Microsoft Makes $20 billion dollar bid for Linux based Yahoo
November 30, 2008
The UK Times is reporting that Microsoft and Yahoo! are in a $20 billion dollar deal (less than half their bid in February of $44.6 Billion) , the question not asked is what is Microsoft going to do with all those Linux servers? Virtually the entire Yahoo infrastructure is based on Linux. The question at hand is even more important than the advertising dollars at hand… because the question actually affects their OS sales.
Do they plan on moving Yahoo’s infrastructure to Windows… an endeavor that will take years… and is in effect redeveloping the wheel.
What are the options? If this (now more than 1/2 price off sale of Yahoo) turns into a “let’s move everything to Windows” you’re looking at a lost 20 billion because the ROI on this will take a decade or longer to make it work and vast sums of money spent for a not-worthwhile cause. Whereas if Microsoft does adopt the Linux standard for Yahoo.. it makes for a delicate question. Why does Microsoft Run Linux for their websites? Is Linux superior to Windows? We could just hear it now “Even Microsoft uses Linux!”
Edit : Some are saying they are on FreeBSD .. However Netcraft verified that Yahoo News is running on Linux.
Edit 2 : there are all sorts of statements regarding the times article.
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Well, I never thought I would say I am happy if Microsoft will acquire Yahoo! . But your suggestion is absolutely great. Let Microsoft buy Yahoo!, I bet the ego maniacs in Redmond will spend tons of money and time on the adventure of migrating all the servers to Microsoft Servers.
This will be great, they will spend money on almost unaccomplished task, which for sure help throw them away to the garbage bin of history…
When Microsoft bought Hotmail in 2000, they insisted on converting Hotmail’s Unix servers to Windows Server 2000. The result was several years of slow, unreliable email service with frequent outages. It gave Hotmail a bad reputation, and caused many existing subscribers to defect to competitors.
There can be no doubt that Microsoft will convert Yahoo from Linux to Windows. And there can be no doubt that that will cause no end of trouble for them. Also, since Yahoo is a Linux shop, look for Microsoft to lay off much of Yahoo’s IT staff.
The Hotmail debacle was a much smaller scale of conversion than will be the Yahoo conversion. So, look for a much bigger debacle this time.
Doh! Yahoo uses FreeBSD!
http://zer0.org/daemons/yahoobsd.html
You shouldn’t shout doh! so quickly…
Netcraft is Verifying that Yahoo News is running on Linux
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=news.yahoo.com