There was some speculation in the media earlier last year that Microsoft was going to acquire Yahoo! Inc. Now, what would happen if the world’s software giant Microsoft bought the world’s number one online portal Yahoo!? I am not blogging about search engine issues here though there would be an angle to that too. Well, on the search engine front, they would simply find a way to merge the search algorithms as well as search index, of both Windows Live Search and Yahoo! Search.

Can you hazard what they would change the name of the Yahoo portal to? Perhaps they would not change it at all. Yahoo! has evolved over the years to become a leading brand on the Internet. Scrapping the brand will not be a smart idea, in my opinion.

The area I want to concentrate on is the programming language Yahoo! has used on much of its online estate. Many sections of Yahoo.com (I don’t know what percentage) are coded using PHP. At least, some are obviously PHP.

PHP is an open-source programming language popular used for server-side scripting in developing dynamic websites/applications. It is popular among many leading websites and open source geeks.

Microsoft on the other hand, developed rival language, ASP.NET. According to Wikipedia:

ASP.NET is a web application framework marketed by Microsoft that programmers can use to build dynamic web sites, web applications and XML web services. It is part of Microsoft’s .NET platform and is the successor to Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (ASP) technology.

Now this is where it gets interesting. Will Microsoft get rid of all the millions of Yahoo pages scripted in PHP and replace same with ASP.NET? Will they maintain the PHP scripts?

What do you think? Share your thoughts here and now!