I’m sure by now that everyone has heard that Microsoft has bid for Yahoo! at a price of $31 per share. As you can probably imagine, there’s been a lot of buzz around the office today regarding this, from shock at the movement of the Yahoo! stock to jokes about how this would change our culture to who would be the first people to abandon ship if this actually happened. Also being the last day of my boss, this has led to precious little productivity (I say this hoping that possible future Microsoft bosses aren’t reading, of course).

Since I’ve already been inundated by IMs and emails today regarding this, I figure I’ll just answer all the questions here:

1. I don’t know if it will go through. I don’t have a crystal ball. Okay, so maybe I do, but it doesn’t actually work, it’s just for decoration. In any event, I’m just an engineer, do you really think the board would tell me before they tell you?
2. I don’t know if it would be a good thing or a bad thing. Typically, I don’t label things as “good” or “bad”, I just accept what reality has thrust upon me. There are numerous ways that this could be an interesting acquisition/merger and there are numerous ways that leave question marks.
3. I’m not worried, not at all. Not worried I’m going to lose my job either to layoffs or to a new suitor. Not worried about corporate culture. I’m just not worried about this at all. Why not? Is it because I’m just so damn valuable? Is it because I want to work for Microsoft? It’s because Yahoo! is a huge company and I don’t concern myself with things that go on several levels up the organizational hierarchy…trying to do so surely leads to insanity. I’ve said this to co-workers before and I’ll repeat it now: I’m assuming that someone will tell me directly if some change is going to occur that actually affects me specifically. Until that happens, I keep doing my job the same way I’ve been doing it for the past 18 months.

I’ll admit, a few thoughts of how the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! working together have passed through my mind, but it’s all just so speculative that it’s not even worth mentioning. I love Yahoo!, I bleed purple, and I’ll not be folding up my tent anytime soon. I’m sure it’ll be an interesting couple weeks coming up, so we’ll all just have to wait and see what happens.