The proposed buy out of Yahoo! from Microsoft is very common knowledge, and a number of people have been throwing around their opinion. There is a natural knee jerk reaction to be anti Microsoft, however in my opinion there is a very valid reason to be wary of the threat and what it could mean for the future of the web.
The idea is, that Yahoo! and Microsoft together can combine to take on Google. In the terms of advertising this is a valid point, but beyond that you realise that Yahoo! and Microsoft are in competition with each other more than they are with Google.
Neither Microsoft nor Yahoo! will claim their searching is on a par with Google's, but then this isn't their forté. Their main pull is as an internet portal, content and every day services all funded by advertising. Whilst Google has very strong services, many are aimed more at content owners (analytics adwords, feedburner) than the layman. Their main forté is driving traffic based on other peoples content, be it via search, google news, google reader or social content like YouTube and Blogger.
Looking at services you can see the similarities between Yahoo!'s and MSN's both very content driven, and then compare them with Google's which are very search focussed.
This leads me to my main concern: liquidation. With Microsoft and Yahoo! having so many competing services built on competing platforms I can only see Microsoft removing Yahoo! from the web after consuming their users.
It would not make good business sense to run competing services, especially not when you can't run them at minimal extra cost. With Yahoo! being built on open source technology and Microsoft using their own propriety technologies there is little they could utilise from acquiring Yahoo!... other than their users!
So what does this mean for the web? Well, we can look forward to total rebrand! Microsoft will not do a Google/YouTube and stick with a brand, we will not see Microsoft continue Yahoo! Mail, it will become Hotmail before you can blink. Will My Yahoo! beat My MSN, will MSN Video loose out to Yahoo! Video and will Live maps get canned in favor of Yahoo! maps... The answer is no, there is no way Microsoft will admit that their brand is not powerful enough to consume Yahoo!'s services.
The future as I see it would be a huge push for Microsoft web technologies, from .NET to Silverlight and a huge bias to Windows via integration, leaving other computers, technologies and browsers in the dark (see above photo for proof). Being a huge fan of Yahoo!'s recent approach to best practice development, and YDN this is very sad, and being an Apple user and LAMP developer, it is even more so...
The only hope would be another company taking the place of Yahoo!, perhaps Ask.com, Amazon or AOL?
I still have hope for a late bid from another company, perhaps even Apple could come in with a little help form Google... heres to hoping ;)