What Will Come from Microsoft's Buyout of Yahoo

This announcement was many months in the making but it looks like Microsoft will be buying out Yahoo to the tune of $45 billion. The article above gives us some color on what might happen when the two companies merge. The first thing that will probably happen is that MSN will probably get folded into the Yahoo site so MSFT will stop losing money there. This change would be very intriguing though.

Eventually, a teamed-up Yahoo and Microsoft might be able to rethink the PC
desktop — where Windows still runs 90 percent of the world's PCs — so that
Internet data such as stock prices, sports scores and weather are automatically
baked in.
"We all have our home page because we have a concept of a home page," Campbell said. Before long, "we may not have a home page — it might just be the background of my desktop. There's no reason why Microsoft can't push this
another level."

So Yahoo might provide the userbase and content for a web and non-web collaboration type of software. So it will be kind of like those Vista Gadgets but for the entire PC and not just the Sidebar. It would be a kind of internet dashboard built into a web enabled PC.

Maybe the next Office or Windows will be an all-online version where there will be an option to store your documents, bookmarks, settings, etc. in a Yahoo Data Center (a MSFT one would not be trusted) and sped up using virtualization software. The icons on your PC will simply connect to software running somewhere "in the cloud" that doesn't have to be upgraded or patched at the PC level since that will all be done on the server. It would be kind of like World of Warcraft servers but for Corporate IT and your avatar is yourself. You could even have complicated Database software or e-mail where both the software and the data files are both stored at the Yahoo data center. You could also have everything searchable with Yahoo's software. It would be a Salesforce.com for productivity suites.

Then you add connectivity from any device be it cell phone, smart phone, laptop, set-top box, etc. then you will have "One Homepage to Rule Them All" accessible 24-7 from any broadband connection in the world. So this Yahoo/MSFT OS combo will not be some POS software that slows down your PC like Vista but instead it will be an always-on Web 2.0 productivity device.