It's kind of disturbing how many people think this is all no big deal! Then again I guess that many people just really don't have a clue about these things but still want to get that extra post count +1.

This sort of thing happens way too often for it to be a big deal.

No, these gigantic takeovers of the most major companies in a major field do not happen all that often. This is Microsoft and Yahoo we're talking about here, not ZilchByte Internet Solutions and MegaSlice Inc.; it's certainly going to have a big effect, as these are big players.

Like, you don't need to go running around screaming when this happens (like I said already) but you're basically clueless about this if you just sit down and say "what's the big deal?"

Okay whatever guys. You obviously don't care about this too much, that's fine. If you cared about this even a slight bit, at least you'd give some kind of reasoning for why you keep saying "eh, no big deal".

It seems as though most of you are just going with your gut feeling that tells you there's no need to care about big (really big) companies buying each other out. Usually, there's no reason to care, that's true, but this time there's quite a bit at stake which we should care about. Namely, the Web. You simply cannot deny the influence that this will have on the Web, since two of the largest players might team up to take on Google.

Have you forgotten that one of them is a convicted monopolist that doesn't care about Web standards and doesn't care that the Internet should be a platform-neutral service? What about their record of messing up Web services they buy? Will Yahoo be compelled to switch to the Windows platform (they mostly use FreeBSD right now I think), potentially forcing them to buy new hardware while they experience technical problems in the meantime? You know that mindshare is very important to Microsoft, so certainly they won't let Yahoo's success story have anything to do with platforms other than Windows. Same for their open-source contributions and contributors; what will happen to Rasmus Lerdorf, the lead developer of PHP, who's currently an engineer at Yahoo?

In any case, I don't see any good coming out of this deal for us, the end users.

No, it is a big deal, it's just not scary.

Well, sure. I never really thought it was scary either, that's a bit of an exaggeration. But it's something worth noting and worrying over.

edit: I must be underestimating how frightening this is if people are pulling out their Orwell quotes, jesus christ.

I agree with you there!

XP was decent

That has nothing to do with the Web.

Wouldn't it be better it microsoft bought yahoo. then we would have wo good search enigines. and if google ever wne off for updating we woudn't die?!

Not really. Neither have particularly good search technology, so I doubt that combining them would make the product better than Google. Besides, Google doesn't go down so easily. It has so many high-performance servers running constantly that it would take a worldwide disaster for them to simultaneously go down.