Translation from PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Microsoft Platforms & Services Division President Kevin Johnson’s Email to Employees re: Update on Yahoo! Proposal

First, the industry needs a more compelling alternative in search and online advertising.

Google is eating our lunch.

The focus of our combined company will be to build great experiences and platforms for our joint consumers, advertisers, and publishers.

That stuff about ‘a computer on every desk’, that’s mostly done now, so we’re changing the mission to ‘an ad on every screen, served by a Microsoft-affiliated ad network’, as soon as we make it sound less soul-sucking.

While some overlap is expected in any combination of this size,

it’s getting better as more Yahoo!s flee the sinking ship.

Services we’ve acquired over the years have been based on both Windows and open source technologies.

The freetards have a price, and everyone else is basically doing market research for us.

Although Windows is our strategic platform and in some cases the teams ultimately migrated their products to Windows for a variety of reasons, in other cases we have prioritized continuity and have used open interoperability mechanisms to achieve effective systems integration.

You will have the front end on ASP.NET by the end of next quarter.

Yahoo! has made significant investments in both its skills and technologies, so we would work closely with Yahoo! engineers to make pragmatic platform and integration methodology decisions as appropriate, prioritizing above all how those decisions would impact customers.

Until enough of the original team is gone, and we can get everything ported over to Windows platform stuff.

Prior to close of the transaction, no Microsoft employee should reach out to Yahoo! employees for the purpose of integration planning unless specifically instructed to do so by the integration team and its LCA advisors.

It is also considered unsporting to point and laugh.