• After XBox this will take their focus further away from enterprise software. Good for Oracle.
• I wonder how my friends at Yahoo (none of which I know to be great fans of Microsoft’s software) feel about this (on the other hand the stock price rise can’t be too unpleasant for them)
• Time to get ready to move away from Yahoo Mail

Turns out I should have added an additional piece of good news to the first bullet: after this they won’t be able to afford SAP for a while. This I just realized after reading this New York Times column which argues, in short, that Microsoft should acquire SAP rather than Yahoo.

A few quotes from the article:

• “you’ve probably never heard of BEA“: this obviously doesn’t apply to readers of this blog.
• “it’s not much fun hanging out on the enterprise side of the software business“: ouch. If it’s fun you’re after, try the IT management segment of enterprise software business.
• “to find the best acquisition strategy, ask, ‘What would Larry do?’“: does this come as a bumper sticker?

Of course if Microsoft gets Yahoo and things go really badly, then it could be SAP who acquires Microsoft…