Update your hate, people. Wasting it on MS is plain embarrassing.

Eliminating top-tier, expensive talent helps Yahoo! offer the third. I’m sure Microsoft believes they already have top-tier talent so why would they really want more if they don’t have to pay for it.

I wonder what percent of the Flickr user base would jump ship if it was acquired by Microsoft.

Most of the talented people still there will leave if the acquisition goes through, and Microsoft knows that. Remember: because turnover is so high in mature web companies, the people who actually got the system up and running have already left. Nobody buys a mature company for the employees.

Perhaps the Macalope’s implication is that Microsoft just wants Yahoo!’s users and doesn’t give two craps about, y’know, the people responsible for gaining them users in the first place. That would be a very typically corporate perspective to have, but surely MS isn’t that stupid.

Microsoft doesn’t want Yahoo’s contrary executives, or their competing brands, or their non-Windows server infrastructure, or their existing non->.NET codebase; I just always assumed that the talented developers were what Microsoft hoped to gain from Yahoo to begin with.