MS Yahoo: The Real Deal

Jeff Taylor | February 1, 2008

I haven't read every single story on Microsoft's $44 billion offer for Yahoo! but the ones that I have fail to emphasize the major factor in Redmond's thinking: Google Desktop.

Forget search engines and queries and ads -- Microsoft really does not care about that. It does care, however, that more and more folks are figuring out that distributed apps can be very handy. That you can do all kinds of things with wikis. That there is no reason to ever run Vista as your OS.

This is not an afterthought for MS, this is the primary play. Microsoft cannot afford to sit by while control of the PC desktop moves elsewhere.