If companies can be compared to living beings, then the code used to run them is their DNA. John Gruber of Daring Fireball asks a very pertinent question of the rumored and now supposedly dead talks for Microsoft to buy Yahoo! what exactly would be the plan to run all of the underlying services?
Yahoo is PHP and MySQL headquarters to some extent. Rasmus Lerdorf works at Yahoo! and I can still remember downloading MySQL from Jeremy Zawodony’s server (it was listed in the US MySQL mirrors for a while).
John goes on to ask “When was the last time you saw a new hit web site developed using Microsoft’s web stack?”. Well, Google’s Orkut was built on Microsoft’s .Net platform, but I heard they had some serious issues with scaling it.
Personally, a merger between the two just seems like a disaster.
these trifling details really are of no import.
if microsoft indeed was obsessed with the technology stack of any acquisition, they would just port it (as they did hotmail).
in the case of yahoo, this would be a decade-long operation, if they cared at all.
microsoft isn’t talking to yahoo so it can acquire jeremy zawodny and rasmus lerdorf. they want ad revenue and ad relationships.
Dear Mr. “whoopee”,
I’d suggest that these trifling details mentioned are the difference between a profitable or unprofitable merger /acquisition.
While Microsoft would undoubtedly like to increase their revenue in ad markets they’d still need to make a “build it or buy it” decision.
If it would take a decade, be as painful as the HotMail switchover and they’d lose the top brains at the company they’re acquiring (aka Jeremy, Rasmus, etc.) I would certainly think it would factor into the equation.