Speaking as someone who has been through several M&A processes, both as a accquisitor and accquiree, I can see the advantages from the business point of view, but I am convinced that the process will “fail”.
The example of Hotmail, which also had a FreeBSD infrastructure, where the server count doubled as they were converted to running Windows, the process for which took more than two years, is instructive.
The fundamental point about M&A is to integrate quickly, or all the good people will leave out of frustration at the friction. Yahoo cannot be integrated quickly into Microsoft, because the latter are going to be utterly hung up on ensuring that everything runs on windows, IIS and SQL server. Even assuming MS spend unlimited amounts of money porting code and scripts to Windows, the doubling of a literally 6 figure number of servers involves actually building additional datacentres; which takes 2-3 years.
My prediction is that the takeover will fail, with Microsoft left with the search code but little else. They could always have planned it this way of course, but it’s an awful lot of money just to remove someone who doesn’t even threaten their main revenue stream.
R
