Microsoft-Yahoo deal: What about developers?

by Chris Kanaracus

February 5, 2008 —

While observers believe that Microsoft is willing to pay
Yahoo $44 billion primarily for its users and advertising base, Microsoft's
chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, wants to grow its developer community as
well.

"We respect the work Yahoo has done in the realm of creating an open development
platform through its Yahoo Developer network and look forward to extending this
great work to an even broader base of developers," he said during a press
conference discussing Microsoft's offer on Friday.

The question now is how that process would unfold. Yahoo's approach to development
has indeed emphasized
open source. In contrast, Microsoft has a deep investment in its proprietary
.NET programming framework and Visual Studio IDE (integrated development environment).
It only recently began making
some overtures to the open-source community.

But Microsoft also boasts a vast army of loyal developers -- something that
Yahoo can't necessarily claim, although it does maintain the Yahoo
Developer Network. And a Yahoo purchase clearly ties into its emerging "software-plus-services"
strategy for distributing online applications.

This may be a case where the pieces fit to form a serendipitous whole, according
to one observer.

"Yahoo has the most beautiful set of [application programming interfaces]
in its properties," such as for the Flickr photo-sharing site, said James
Governor, an analyst with Redmonk. "But frankly, it just has not done a
great job of building an ecosystem. ... There's no such thing as a 'Yahoo developer.'"

Yahoo's tools hold promise, but really need a high-profile evangelist pushing
hard behind them, Governor argued. "The first thing I would do in taking
over the company would be to get someone who really understands APIs ... to
me, Jon Udell -- who is now
at Microsoft -- would be ideal in this role. He would be someone I would be
thinking of right away," he said.

While Yahoo's APIs arguably are more consumer-oriented, they could still hold
value within the average corporate shop, Governor said. "There's no reason
why Flickr can't have some enterprise applicability. ... For the enterprise
developer it's probably not the biggest thing in the world, but it definitely
offers some cool new things."

But other observers said there are obstacles as well as opportunities.

John Gruber, who writes about the Web and Apple at his site, daringfireball.net,
sees a major architectural clash between Microsoft and Yahoo, which has an infrastructure
that incorporates Linux.

"I don't think Microsoft has ever bought -- and maintained -- a significant
software product that wasn't written against Microsoft technology," he
wrote on his blog. "So there's a paradox: Technically, I can't see
how Microsoft would migrate all of Yahoo to Windows servers and software. But
culturally, it just isn't in Microsoft's DNA to accept and maintain all of these
PHP/FreeBSD/Linux products."

Robert McLaws, a .NET developer and blogger at windows-now.com, questioned
the overall wisdom of the acquisition attempt, given this inconsistency. "If
one of the points in buying them is their infrastructure, but their infrastructure
isn't Windows, what are they buying?" he said in an interview on Monday.

Yet there's no doubt that Microsoft would move to merge its tools and assets
with Yahoo's, according to Greg DeMichillie, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft
and a contributor to the initial design of the .NET Framework. "Anything
Microsoft does, they think about it from a platform perspective," he said.

The final shape of that platform is far from clear, as there are substantial
redundancies between the companies' services offerings. (Purely on the development
front, Yahoo and Microsoft are competing within the mashup market, with their
Pipes and Popfly toolsets, respectively.)

For developers already wedded to the Microsoft platform, the major pitfall
is the "corporate indigestion" that could follow a deal, according
to DeMichillie.

"The biggest risk to developers is that it defocuses executives from the
important job of getting a Vista successor out," he said.

A Microsoft spokesperson said Monday that the company would not comment beyond
materials
on its Web site announcing the proposed deal.

IDG News Service