For $50 billions MS can hire virtually thousands of talented programmers, designers, project managers, etc. so the whole affair looked very questionable.

Besides yahoo!'s web infrastructure is solely based on open source solutions and being acquired by MS could only mean that yahoo's support for open source would be ceased.

Give it a couple years and you'll find out Yahoo could be bought for a fraction of the price. Yahoo is just prettying up the financials for a good deal. Their underlying business is weaker than it appears.

If MS had paid what they wanted the Y execs would have been laughing all the way to the bank.