Microsoft Throws Yahoo a Bone
by Jeremy on Feb.01, 2008, under Uncategorized
I have to admit that I’m a little concerned about this. Apparently, Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo and threw $44.6 billion at them in an offer.
My question is what does this mean for PHP if Yahoo accepts the offer? Not enough major players use PHP and Yahoo was one of our best aces to throw when people started talking down about the language. What’s Microsoft going to do with Yahoo if they buy them out?
Maybe someone with a little more knowledge on the issue can shed some light somewhere …
February 1st, 2008 on 12:35 pm
I don’t think it’s going to mean a whole lot for PHP. Yahoo and Google have bought out other companies for their web applications, and they never rewrote them in their language of choice (Orkut’s in ASP). This should especially hold for something like Yahoo, since there’s probably tens of millions of lines of code in all their services combined. I don’t think Microsoft is going to waste a couple years and millions in developer salaries to convert it to ASP or some such. What would they have to gain by doing that?
It would also be very foolish to just “shut it off” since millions of people still use its services, and also because you wouldn’t drop $44 billion and not get any return on it. Microsoft is rich, but I’m pretty sure $44 billion is a big chunk of their worth, so they wouldn’t throw it around carelessly.
February 1st, 2008 on 4:42 pm
But Yahoo and Google don’t have proprietary programming languages either. Microsoft may find rewriting Yahoo’s software in ASP more attractive then using the competition’s language.