Earlier this week The New York Times published a story by John Markoff and Matt Richtel that pointed out the problems of integrating the two cultures and concluded that the different technology choices the companies have made – Yahoo! is open-source, Microsoft, of course, is famously not – will be the biggest obstacle to success because one company will have to be completely torn down to accommodate the other.
The odds of Microsoft being able to avoid this in Yahoo!'s case aren't improved by its history. In nearly 20 years and more than a hundred acquisitions, Microsoft has hewed to a policy of assimilation.
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