Not the first time MS have tried to buy them. Good premium on the Yahoo! share price though (62%). Wonder if MS would bin MSN if they did the deal?
MSN is more than just an IM client, Rubric. It's the entire portal and information services.
As a techie Yahoo, I'm not sure what to make of it (other than not being keen). In terms of technology platforms, Y! and MS are on opposite sides of the park. Y! uses a lot of Open Source software (Rasmus Lerdorf, the PHP creator works here, plus the YUI JavaScript framework, R3 content management system and so on are OSS too), whereas Microsoft (obviously) build on their own closed .NET systems. Basically, there's no real chance of ‘merging’ products. With the companies combined, there's two search engines, two maps sites, two portals, two web programming frameworks…*huge duplication. Pretty bleak if it were to happen, but my feeling is that whilst they'll go through the process of considering it, the companies are quite incompatible.
I would imagine we'd end up with a unified "Messenger" application.Nah they would bin yahoo messenger.