On February 1, Microsoft announced a $44.6 Billion dollar offer to buy Yahoo!

Let's face it. There WILL be problems to over come such as 'How can we put this service into Windows Live?' and 'How can we transfer these Yahoo! IDs onto a Windows Live ID?'

You know how you can use any email as Live ID? That's what they're going to do, simply offer users a choice: Use current Yahoo ID and email as your Windows Live ID or create a new Windows Live ID.

Then they're going to use "Windows Live Yahoo" as their new entertainment/news page (instead of MSN).
Also, the Live QnA team will be merged with the Y! Answers team and they will use their commmon knowledge to create "Windows Live Answers" and adding all of the old questions/answers from the separate services into the same WLA service.
And since Yahoo mail is used by the majority of mail users (according to wikipedia) they are not going to kill the old service, Yahoo Mail users will simply sign in with their Yahoo/WL ID at www.hotmail.com and receive and send their mail in the same way as they did before, only this time it's at a different address with the Hotmail UI.

At least that's what I would do.

The issue I see is development going forwards. For example, do they continue to develop Yahoo Mail as well as Windows Live Hotmail? How about the two messenger clients or two webmessenger clients? In order to achieve the $1billion of cost savings per year they are talking about, they have to cut teams and common products and share the R+D. Running and developing two services in parallel that do the same thing does not achieve this.

That is a ton of money to purchase a competitor who has not developed an OS to date.

I believe this is not a financially sound offer... To much money for too little return.

Microsoft need not worry about anything until another OS is developed (and even then).

Granted, talk about web OS's is flittering about the NET but the reality is Microsoft remains unchallenged.

(my opinion) If Bill Gates was still at the head of MS this offer would never have been made.

Google and Yahoo remain competitors only in the online market.

No OS, no Internet for the moment. (Do not even think about webTV's failure)

Creat a Box that is just plug and play; bootable to the Interent with no OS sort of like a network firmeware boot and we can talk about the demise of Microsoft. Until then no need to purchase even the largest of online competitors!

Just my Viewpoint 

Richard

I think MS should use that amount of money in investigations and developings to be better instead of buy Yahoo.