Yahoo accepts Microsoft 45 billion dollars offer in February 2008
Yuelang
Banned
And another flip side...
Yahoo products and Microsoft products are BOTH notoriously feature heavy and take massive tools on memories and bandwidth.
If anything, Microsoft could be very well dragged to feature inflation and development hell that plagued Yahoo... Imagine Windows 8 with even far more useless contents and massive redundant and unintuitive UI instead of the streamlined ones.
in 2016, most of us would be using Linux ITTL
Yahoo products and Microsoft products are BOTH notoriously feature heavy and take massive tools on memories and bandwidth.
If anything, Microsoft could be very well dragged to feature inflation and development hell that plagued Yahoo... Imagine Windows 8 with even far more useless contents and massive redundant and unintuitive UI instead of the streamlined ones.
in 2016, most of us would be using Linux ITTL
The Yahoo accusation would very doubtfully have any impact on Windows or Windows server, especially since the entire idea if I remember correctly was about competing with google and helping out Microsoft with Search.
In any case as @catsmate1 said it would be a disaster for Microsoft. They'd probably end up writing a significant portion of the entire acquisition off just like they've done with Nokia.
If Microsoft was successful in buying Yahoo, they may not know what to do with it. Microsoft at that time made most of its money selling software, usually to businesses (Office, SQLSERVER, Windows Server). Yahoo is mostly a consumer portal. Maybe Yahoo could have added some value to MSN/Live/Bing, but Microsoft would likely be more interested in the software business.
I could see separate MSN and Yahoo sites for a few years. Microsoft would eventually try to fold certain functions of Yahoo into MSN, even replacing some MSN sites with the Yahoo equivalents. Hotmail could be replaced with Yahoo Mail, and MSN Sports replaced by Yahoo Sports. There may even be a web browser in Windows 10 called Yahoo Edge.
I doubt there would be a search engine called Bing, since Yahoo had its own search engine at the time Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo.
I generally see it eventually being viewed as a major strategic error in terms of corporate mistakes. MicroSoft launched their own search engine and associated services but as far as I'm aware have never achieved 10% or more of the market, I'm honestly not sure what buying Yahoo!, who whilst starting off with a good position nowadays also has less than 10% market share, would change to stop Google dominating things. Assuming that they managed to keep all of the two company's users and not scare any away from changes they make when combining them, not a given, MicroSoft will have just thrown away roughly 40 billion dollars to double their market share to maybe 15%.
If Microsoft were to invest 45 Billion, it is reasonable to assume they intend to protect their large investment. What would that include? Integration of MSN/Live/Bing with Yahoo products, where in after a year we would see only one elegant enhanced version that should be better than both, so it is either Yahoo mail, or Hotmail. Microsoft would not only have a better starting position with Yahoo, but also they would have a lot more resources to compete with Google. I see a new dedicated browser coming earlier, one with a set of apps resembling Google apps, that is very nicely integrated with Office, perhaps even offering running entire Office within new YEdge browser to business customers. This would also signal their delve into mobile market a lot sooner, because they will want YEdge and Yahoo used as much as possible. I can't say how likely it is, but it seems plausible to me that were they to play their cards right, they could get at least 40% market share in domain of search engine, browser and associated services, and also a decent percent of share in the mobile market. They might even pull off a successful Nokia acquisition later on.
Steve Ballmer gets fired by 2010. Bing and Yahoo get merged into one platform which is good because instead of two shitty search engines/portals, now you only have one. Marissa Mayer preserves her reputation by staying at Google or going to a better alternative.
Microsoft has never "gotten" consumers. Whenever they have been successful with consumers, like with PCs, its because it was a derivative of their corporate success. They were talking about how they were going to dominate TV 5 years ago now via X box. Zune. Windows phone. They are really good in the corporate world. Not so great with consumers. So, I dont see all your ideas succeeding.
To me new, Microsoft Surface seems like they finally "got" the consumers. But I am a Linux type of fella, so we'll see... Question is how plausible it is to happen in 2008-2009? I say there was a decent chance, if some changes were to be applied (Yahoo acquisition and reorganization around it to make it successful one), but I might of course be totally wrong as well.