Markoff cites one of my favorite examples: Microsoft’s 1997 purchase of Hotmail. It took 3.5 years to convert Hotmail servers from UNIX to Windows!

Microsoft has little choice but to “eat its own dog food”. Industry insiders expect Microsoft to use its own web sites to demonstrate the scalability, reliability and features of Windows server software.

Yahoo uses FreeBSD, a version of UNIX, as its primary server OS, along with Java and PHP as programming languages.

It would take an enormous effort by Microsoft to port Yahoo to a Windows infrastructure. I agree with Markoff: Yahoo’s developers and programmers might cooperate if Jerry Yang blessed Microsoft’s takeover.

If it’s a hostile takeover, forget it. Yahoo will bleed OSS and UNIX talent. Those employees will leave Yahoo before they cooperate with the “enemy”: Microsoft.

Still, it could happen. MySpace hasn’t been the advertising giant that News Corp envisioned. If Yahoo knows anything, it’s advertising.

Here’s an article from today’s Guardian. Rupert Murdoch has little to lose by courting Yahoo.

Last June, there were reports that News Corp wanted to give MySpace to Yahoo, in return for a 30% stake in Yahoo.

If there’s anything that I need to avoid, it’s the prospect of “mY!space.”

The logical collaboration would be AOL/Yahoo, because the combined web presence of both could rival the ubiquitous G. I do have to say though, unless they come up with a SaaS web program as savvy as the gMail/google docs/gCal EVERYONE is dead in the water.