Some days ago Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Yahoo for $46.6 billion is about growing its consumer advertising and portal business to better compete wit Google. And that’s certainly part of the mix, but perhaps lost in the discussion is how such an acquisition could help Microsoft execute its software-plus-services strategy for delivering business apps over the Internet faster and better, said several analysts. That strategy could help Microsoft compete with Google’s own business-apps initiative, they said.

“Yahoo has very efficient datacenters, as does Microsoft,” noted Rob Koplowitz, a Forrester Research analyst. By combining their datacenters — and, more important, their engineering talent — Microsoft should be able to move faster and more efficiently on delivering business apps over the Internet, something that Microsoft has done at a fairly slow pace so far. “Yahoo’s engineers can help,” he noted, “And you know that there’ll be engineers who are freed up” after the acquisition, should it go through.

“Although Google Applications have yet to make a real dent in the Microsoft Office giant, they do pose a long-term threat,” said David Mitchell, a senior IT researcher at the consultancy Ovum. “As a defense against this position, Microsoft needs to accelerate its own move into online services. The online engineering capabilities that Yahoo has will undoubtedly offer Microsoft the potential to bring new services to market” and will help Microsoft stay competitive…..Read the complete article here

I think that it’s a bad idea, I don’t like it. Microsoft is a big company, the most of computers in the world use their operative system Windows, even being the most insecure. The thing is that the big companies end buying the small ones, this is like a loop. As Google has bought Feedburner, Facebook, Youtube… Microsoft want to eat another great company. I think Yahoo has the potential to grown up, even more than they has been doing, and if Microsoft buy Yahoo, all that great work will be dropped, I simply don’t want to lose Yahoo :evil.

What do you think about that deal?