Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo in $44.6 billion deal

I don't know... I'm skeptical. It would mean only two really big players left, in some ways. It might also mean the end of some cool open source stuff that Yahoo has been doing lately. Lucene, Hadoop, the Javascript lib - they're releasing a lot of good stuff.

Not really sure what it would mean for both companies, too. They have a lot of overlapping businesses, but very different approaches. What a wreck it would be trying to transition Yahoo to Windows servers.

Gotta love this line: "Microsoft said it had identified four areas that would generate at least $1 billion in annual synergies for the combined entity."

MS has nothing but many failed attempts to create web sites. Absolutely no positive experience in the field, all negative, and they are going to run flickr, del.icio.us and many others. No, seriously, these are the pearls of social networking... If this sale happens, that would be a bad day for the 'Net.