Wow. From the Asso­ci­ated Press:

Microsoft Corp. has pounced on slump­ing Inter­net icon Yahoo Inc. with an unso­licited takeover offer of $44.6 bil­lion in its bold­est bid yet to chal­lenge Google Inc.’s dom­i­nance of the lucra­tive online search and adver­tis­ing markets.

That’s nuts. I don’t use Yahoo, but I’m already seeing it infil­trated by little rain­bowy but­ter­flies spread­ing craplets.

Via Daring Fire­ball.

Update: The more I think about this, the bigger it is. I was just think­ing about Yahoo search mostly. What’s going to happen with Flickr if this goes through? YUI? I can’t imag­ine Microsoft not screw­ing these things up. I’m not trying to bash Microsoft, they just don’t have a very good track record. Hot­mail anyone? Gruber has some more artic­u­late thoughts (as usual).