I am thoroughly convinced Microsoft will botch up this acquisition, but that's only because it's usually a safe bet that Microsoft will botch up anything internet related. They just don't get it.

This article is based largely on the assumption that priority number one will be to port everything to Windows and I think this is an absurd assumption to make.

Are we to believe that Microsoft is willing to risk throwing away $100M+ in order to migrate this thing to Windows?

Don't forget that Microsoft ran Hotmail on Unix for years. I imagine by the time they got around to porting it to Windows they were about ready for an upgrade anyway. (Plus, Windows was finally getting to the point where a project like that could even be considered.)

My guess is the meat of this deal was about bringing in some new IP and some bright engineers- not about running some search engine that almost no one has heard of. In that case, the platform it runs on is largely irrelevant.