My comment on this merger: Yahoo's founders would do anything to avoid this...A takeover means that the legacy created by the internet search engine pioneer would be destroyed completely.  Their survival as a "Yahoo" brand is doomed to the history books!  Jerry Yang would go down in history as being the pioneer of a defunct business (a failure by all means).  BTW, In conventional practices, whenever a horizontal integration occurs, the one being bought off is usually just sucked dry; Chase and Bank One comes to mind primarily.  For Microsoft, they have all to gain and we may see a hostile takeover here (something we haven't seen for a while on the street).  Why would MSFT want to do that: First of all, to gain opportunities of market growth more quickly than through internal means.  The other benefits that come along are : benefits from economies of scale, gaining a more dominant position in a national or global market and they'd acquire the skills or strengths of another firm to complement their existing search-engine business.

And who's to blame for this fiasco at Yahoo?  Well, the CEO/founder himself and his officers...Yahoo brought about its own destruction as they were tech savvy but financial knowledge they completely lacked.  How could anyone with such a dominating market share until 2001, in just 7 years fall in such a state??  If this is how new-age business' come and fall from dominance, then the IT major in college is a field we should ask our Nepali peers to start avoiding as the uncertainty is certainly not worth it.