On the morning of February 1st 2008, Microsoft announced an unsolicited bid of $44.6B hostile for Yahoo!, and by the end of the day, Microsoft had lost $20B in market capitalization. Where does this leave Microsoft's open source strategy and the analysis thereof?
Yahoo! was a pioneering "internet company", one of the first to really create and capture value of a world newly web-enabled. And like many of these so-called internet companies (Google was another), Yahoo! built it infrastructure on open source technologies. Why? Better, faster, cheaper: Dave Filo and Jerry Yang were still poor college students back in the day, but smart. (As were Sergey Brin and Larry Page, but that's another story.)