Will Yahoo be no more?

I’m not sure I understand your question, “Yahoo!,” while still struggling – still receives over 130 million unique users per month. They’re worth billions, there’s no reason to assume whoever buys them (rumor has it that News Corp is also trying) would just “close them out.”

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out in the end but it’ll be years most likely before we as internet users are ‘affected’ – that is, unless you own Yahoo! stock. Then you have good news coming your way. ;)

You won’t be affected by the Microsoft/Yahoo! merger unless you own stock, as the Yahoo! services will continue to operate. Although the future of services like Flickr are uncertain business-wise (will Microsoft sell them, for example?) these websites will not disappear or drastically change.

I am a huge fan of Del.icio.us

That is my only concern if MS takes over Yahoo. I actually exported everything this morning once I heard about the possible buy-out. I know it will take some time for Microsoft to screw it up. But, I have about 4000 bookmarks and don’t want to risk losing them.

edit :: I don’t think Microsoft will make them magically disappear. They might remove the export function and force me to get a WindowsLiveExtreme2Ultimate account to access them.

As far as I know I’m only an avid user of delicious, and their new version is turning out awesome, so I hope they will be allowed to continue doing their thing. I’ve looked around for alternatives in the past, but then the only reasonable one I found was Yahoo! Bookmarks, and well… Then I returned when delicious created their new Firefox extension, and what with their new version coming…

In any case, I wouldn’t expect drastic changes in the coming year/two years, as it really takes a lot of time to digest a company of this size. And the big services will most likely not close out :)

If Microsoft is successful at acquiring Yahoo I would switch my home/startup page to Iwon.com. Used it before when it first came out. I checked they’re still around.

If Microsoft takes over Yahoo, I won’t change much.

If Microsoft starts to screw up the Yahoo services I use—like they screwed up Hotmail when they first acquired it—then I’ll find other services to use instead, just as I switched from Hotmail to Yahoo mail when Microsoft screwed up Hotmail.

If they don’t screw anything up, I’ll stick with them.