What will coders at Yahoo do?
Scott Rosenberg argues that Microsoft’s takeover bid for Yahoo could spell doom for both companies ala the AOL Netscape deal.
I found his assessment quite accurate, so let me present some more points along the same lines.
When two companies merge, one of the biggest challenges they face is in integrating their workforce.
It is my belief, that there too many Anti-Microsoft stalwarts within Yahoo, for this merger to be a success. Let’s face it. The programmers of this world have been a divided lot, probably for the last 20 years.
There is one camp that believes strongly in open source, wants to confirm to open standards, and generally follows the “Don’t be evil principle”. There is the other camp that wants to protect everything using the strongest lock and keys around, don’t want to align with standards and don’t even give the documentation of their API’s for free, let alone their tools. The fact is that the animosity between these 2 camps has only deepened in the last 10 years.
The first camp has built or harbored products like Linux, Solaris, Firefox, MySQL, JBoss, Eclipse, Netbeans, GWT, and the Yahoo UI toolkit to name just a few. They have successfully monetized their businesses around open source and open standards and have enriched the lives of millions of people in the process.
The second camp lead by Microsoft, being closed source and inward looking, lost on the opportunity to innovate through community involvement and contribution. Simply put, they never had a community like Ubuntu or KDE or Eclipse.
Yahoo, which runs on open source innovations like FreeBSD, Linux, and MySQL to name just a few, belongs firmly to the first camp, and so do its engineers.
Will these people want to work with Steve Ballmer and Microsoft?
Of course if there is a recession and there are no alternative jobs around, some will be forced to do so, and that’s understandable.
PS: This post was created with MS Office, as the wordpress xmlrpc (and hence scribefire) service seems to be down today. Just look at the amount of useless CSS code it has inserted.
