How does the Yahoo & Microsoft Offer affect sites like FunAdvice?

First, we should say that Microsoft has merely bidded for Yahoo. The whole landscape could change.

Most of the chatter in the blogosphere has been about the financial side of the deal. I have not yet read about the thing that could torpedo Yahoo if its taken over by Microsoft.

See, Yahoo is an open source company.

What does that mean? Yahoo depends on open source and open standards to run their business. Internally, Yahoo is more like Google than Microsoft in that regard. And if Microsoft takes over, it will affect startups like ours in a substantial way.

Yahoo has contributed so many programming tools, from Mapping to my favourite -- Content Analysis. There's also the Yahoo User Interface Library -- YUI including Yahoo Grids. And they've really taken accessible websites to heart and gave people who build startups a lot to ride on. Oh, and they've also use REST in a whole-hearted way, thus moving the industry in general away from the heavier and less intuitive SOAP.

Not to mention PHP, MySQL, OpenBSD, Linux, Qmail and tons of other things.

That's incredible stuff that I can't see Microsoft maintaining. Since all they want is the pageviews, and likely Panama. But Panama's not worth much itself. Microsoft already has ad serving technology which is arguably better than Yahoo's but still light years behind Google's Adwords and Adsense simple-as-pie-that-gets-your-ads-online-in-15-minutes technology.

If I were a programmer at Yahoo, I'd be looking to the exits at this point. Despite the economy, there are still tons of programmer jobs out there that are oriented towards PHP, Java and open source in general.

Can you see Microsoft keeping the open source ecosystem that Yahoo has built and shared with startups like FunAdvice? Would you create your new startup with ASP.net given the availability of free tools like PHP, Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP and other great open source technologies?

Check out:
http://developer.yahoo.com/
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/