Apparently Microsoft is willing to purchase Yahoo! for (US) $44.6 billion. As Michael Osterman notes, this would give Microsoft a huge addition to its consumer email base, through Yahoo!’s world-leading base of webmail users, to compliment Microsoft’s existing Hotmail user community.

Yahoo!’s recent purchase of Zimbra, also means that we’d see a Microsoft Zimbra, although it’s unclear how this would be particularly useful to Microsoft as a business-grade email and collaboration offering, given their existing Exchange/Outlook combination. I guess MS might see it as removing a potential competitor from the enterprise email space?

It will be interesting to see whether this often mooted Yahoo!-Microsoft partnership will actually come to fruition this time. Quite apart from the email aspects of the partnership, I’d be fascinated to see what would come from a merging of their search capabilities and from a combined Microsoft Research and Yahoo! Research.