Well, gee, as if I didn't hate my DSL service on principle enough (supplied by AT& "We will turn off your internet connection if you badmouth us" T), now MS is going to own the mail and bonus services part of it. And no doubt break my email service even more than Yahoo has managed to do (their worthless spam filtering seems to be of the "EVERYTHING is spam!" variety, although I do like the web 2.0 webmail interface).
The day this is approved is the day I cancel service and switch to cable.
Which absolutely sucks, I might add, since I live like half a block from the phone substation.
Dammit.
I do completely agree that this stinks of flushing money down the toilet for absolutely no gain--it's going to hurt both companies even in the moderately short run, and 45Bn is a lot even for MS. Balmer must seriously be losing it.