Good point, I bet MSFT does have a few secure products if we look hard enough. Following your logic, since Notepad [probably] doesn’t have any security holes either, that means that all versions of Windows are secure, right?

End sarcasm.

My original comment stands. Microsoft products are full of security holes. Microsoft has a poor history when it comes to security, and no one in their right mind would deny that, not even Bill Gates himself. Search around and you’ll find his internal memo on Trustworthy Computing.

Microsoft has made progress on this front. They suck less than they did 10 years ago. However, Microsoft is not well trusted in the industry, and a big reason for that is their poor security.

On the whole, I do you really think Yahoo might be forced to use completely different
technology ? Maybe not. ( Not that I have much idea about this ) Things might not be as bad as you feel.

"I encourage you to talk to someone who has worked there or works there now and see if you think they’re evil."

Over the last decade, I’ve worked with MS plenty and asked the pointed questions more than once. The general response was "yes, they are an evil empire. When you start working here you don’t stop thinking they’re evil - you simply start accepting it."

—-

As a Yahoo! engineer, I won’t just lay down my arms and walk away if Microsoft buys us out. Maybe if I were fresh out of school, had no fiscal responsibilities other than to myself, and if I were full of these grand and glowing ideas that there existed a Utopian company… But I know better, and I know that whether you’re going Yahoo! to Google, Google to Yahoo!, or Yahoo! to Microsoft, you’re simply trading one set of headaches for another. I left off a transition starting with Microsoft because everyone knows when Microsoft is on your resume, nobody else wants to hire you anymore.

There was a time when Yahoo was more like Microsoft and Google, and was mostly engineering-driven. Today, Yahoo is mostly comprised of non-technical staff, especially editors (who make up ~20% of the employee base), program managers and sales. Of the few engineers Yahoo does have, most are PHP script-kiddies. The only real centers of engineering excellence at Yahoo are the search, Panama/Apex, and YUI groups. Everything else is junk. That’s why Yahoo relies so heavily on open source — they lack the engineering manpower to build custom systems like Google and Microsoft have done.

When Yahoo is acquired by Microsoft, they will be dazzled by how much more sophisticated Microsoft’s internal engineering is. Yahoo Paranoids can’t hold a candle to Microsoft’s stringent software security reviews. If Microsoft jettisons any Yahoo technologies, it will be to improve Yahoo’s incredibly poor data center utilization and performance (some Yahoo technologies max out at ~10 requests/second — thank goodness for caching and horizontal scaling (= throwing more hardware at it)).

And yet Microsoft is only a shadow of its former excellence — today Google has the best engineers, including most of the best from Yahoo and Microsoft. That’s why Google’s winning and will continue to win. Online advertising and services are technology-driven, and Google has the best technology-makers. These days, even Amazon (a book store!) is kicking Yahoo’s butt. Oh yeah, and Amazon.com is served up using their own custom software, just like Microsoft and Google. If anything, Yahoo is proof that open source isn’t as great as it’s chocked up to be.