Last week’s announcement that Microsoft wants to buy dotcom search veteran Yahoo! raised howls of protest from the blogerati – one of the “good guys” looks like it might become part of the ultimate “bad guy”. But is it really so bad?

Yahoo! has been buying the cool, interesting stuff like del.icio.us and flickr for a while now, leaving Google to go down the office applications and boring old “making lots of money” route. It would be a shame if Yahoo went under – and with last week’s announcement that it was laying off 1000 staff, it’s not entirely impossible it might. And let’s not forget that ten years ago Microsoft bailed out Apple to the tune of $150 million dollars – if it wasn’t for Bill Gates we’d have no iPod, no iPhone and the world would be a little bit less shiny.

So let’s hear it for Microsoft – champions of the little guy.

(Image: from Gnal’s flickr stream)