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Saul Hansell of the New York Times has an updated overview of the proposed Microsoft purchase of Yahoo. As his article’s title implies, merging the two companies is like building a rocket ship from spare parts. Which business units should be kept? What technologies will be used? What strategies will continue, and what new plans will be implemented?

The biggest risk is that engineering teams from Microsoft and Yahoo will spend years fighting to prove their systems are better and their bosses will listen instead of cutting off debate, picking something and trying to actually take on Google.

See my earlier articles from 4 February and 1 February 2008 for more comments.

Early Sunday, I saw this on a BoingBoing article: Google legal counsel David Drummond has released a statement that criticizes the proposed merger as anticompetitive. Here’s a New York Times article about the announcement. Google claims that Microsoft would use Yahoo to push proprietary solutions. Microsoft has a long history of developing and implementing its own extensions to Internet standards.

Elizabeth Montalbano of NetworkWorld had similar concerns in her article. She and the Register point out that Microsoft is really buying Yahoo’s computing platform and user base, partly because Microsoft’s Internet presence ls ineffective.

Of course, both companies have different cultures. One uniting factor may be their mutual envy of Google, as discussed in this BusinessWeek article.

This is not a “done deal” by any means

Yahoo’s board will most likely resist the buyout offer, which may give the Federal government and the EU more time to raise their objections. BusinessWeek has a good summary of the potential challenges to the proposed purchase in this article.

Even if Microsoft does actually purchase Yahoo, victory is not assured. As Joe Nocera of the New York Times pointed out in his article today, Microsoft’s online division is the only one of the company’s five strategic business units (SBUs) that loses money. Adding Yahoo may not stem the flood of red ink.

See my Friday, 1 February 2008 post and comments about the proposed Microsoft purchase of Yahoo for more information and links.

The New York Times reported on 17 January 2008 that Sun is acquiring MySQL for US$1 billion. Sun will use MySQL’s technology and customer list to facilitate an entry into the US$15 billion database market.

I use MySQL to run billso.com. I am hoping that Sun will not change the company’s open source business model. Jeff Gould of Interop News asks an important question – did Sun pay too much? MySQL reported revenues of US$70 million last year. By Gould’s estimate, Sun needs to grow MySQL to US$500 million in sales revenue for this acquisition to work.

Regardless, Sun CEO Jon Schwartz claims his company is the largest OSS firm in the world. Sun now has an important piece of the LAMP stack – that’s the Linux kernel, the Apache web server, MySQL and the Perl, Python and PHP programming languages. This InfoWorld article has some additional background on the acquisition, and why LAMP is a very important piece of the Web, e-commerce and enterprise information systems.

See my article from 25 October 2007 for information about MySQL’s software development pact with Google.

Microsoft Office has huge market share – an estimated half a billion users, according to this interview with Microsoft manager Betsy Frost.

But it’s difficult to compete with free applications offered by well established Web software-as-a-service providers. Today, Google announced its web-based slide show application. This wasn’t a surprise. I mentioned Google’s office apps on 19 April and 23 February. These web-based apps don’t have all the features of Microsoft software, and Google doesn’t support third-party plugins. Plugins are software that hooks in to Microsoft Office applications to provide additional features.

When does free beat market share?

But web-based apps do allow users to share documents online, instead of emailing versions of documents. There are security concerns, of course. Google’s applications are tied into the company’s single signon (SSO) authentication system. Google does offer corporate and educational versions of these services, but storage is centralized in Google’s massive data network. Google isn’t offering a database product, but one could argue that the entire Google office suite is really a vast database full of XML-formatted documents and messages. Corporate customers pay Google US$50 per seat each year for the web-based office applications and email. I haven’t seen how Google controls document sharing on academic networks, either.

Web-based office software is becoming a key success factor for the largest Internet search sites. Email, calendar and address book applications are a logical offering. In most industries, companies must use email, but it’s often cheaper to let someone else run the servers. According to the New York Times, Yahoo just purchased Zimbra, a developer of web-based email services. Zimbra’s annual pricing is reasonable: $28 per seat for corporate customers. Universities pay $1 per student account, and $8 per employee account. At those prices, more universities are outsourcing their email systems. I discussed Google’s academic email services on 11 April. Of course, Yahoo is the dominant webmail provider with 181 million unique visitors each month. Google has only 18 million.

The New York Times reported today that IBM will launch its own downloadable version of Sun’s open source office suite. Users still have to install the IBM applications, so the versioning problem still exists.

But IBM is offering its software for free. Oddly enough, IBM resurrected the Lotus Symphony brand for this product. Of course, IBM is offering technical support for corporate users, but not for free.

Tech: Dvorak devotes another column to his hatred of Microsoft Word. I rarely use the program myself, and agree with him that Word should be scrapped and completely rewritten. Frankly, I get nervous just installing MS Office on a computer these days. The process takes too long, when I include all of the service packs and patches that should be applied to fix Microsoft’s security holes.

What to do? I miss WordPerfect, but I don’t keep it installed. I prefer OpenOffice. It’s free and easy to install. OO does most of what Word can do, and includes a PDF converter. But I do encounter documents that require Microsoft Word for proper formatting, so I keep the free Microsoft Word viewer installed and ready for those misfits. It can print, so I can convert a DOC into PDF format no matter what.

OpenOffice doesn’t have anything like Access, unfortunately. So I go to another machine when I need to use a Microsoft database, which isn’t often. Instead of Outlook, I use Thunderbird, another fast and free wonder that handles e-mail. I’m still looking for a decent event and contact manager, though. When my cell phone contract is up in December, I may get a PDA phone.