Saturday, February 2, 2008, 12:33pm
Yahoo's stuff is almost all written in PHP, and runs on FreeBSD and Red Hat Linux servers. I don't think Microsoft has ever bought -- and maintained -- a significant software product that wasn't written against Microsoft technology. E.g., when they bought Hotmail, the migration from FreeBSD/Apache to Windows 2000 was painful and difficult. Hotmail was just one product (albeit a popular one). Yahoo has hundreds of properties, several of them, I'm guessing, more popular than Hotmail was back in 2000.
I was just wondering this on the way home. Microsoft would also own flickr, too, wouldn't they? Interesting to see how that works out.
This also makes me think that if Microsoft can't do it right themselves (msn.com for search) then they'll buy someone else who gets it right.