What a time to go on holiday. Half way through a most enjoyable away-from-it-all break, I caught the news that Microsoft's Mr Ballmer had dropped another bombshell by bidding for Yahoo! (The previous, impressive, but much smaller bombshell was the pitch for search specialist FAST.)

What the heck's going on? Microsoft appears to be transmogrifying before our eyes. It wasn't like this during Bill Gates' reign. Or maybe Mr Gates was just a bit more subtle. Perhaps, in an extended parallel with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Ballmer has been champing at the bit to do things his way. It only took him a quarter of a century to get the chance.

Either it's dawned on him that Microsoft is totally adrift in the webtop world or the bid is a cynical ploy to destabilise a competitor. (Hat tip to IBM, by the way, for coining 'webtop' over ten years ago)

Yahoo! certainly has a lot of customers and technologies that Microsoft could benefit from. It is a web company from top to bottom and has some interesting ingredients. (I'm writing this in the departure lounge, no internet connection, but del.icio.us, Flickr and Pipes are the things that spring immediately to mind. I'm sure there are plenty more.)

It's interesting that when Yahoo!'s Jerry Yang was in London last October, he revealed a change of attitude in the company in favour of supporting developers rather than trying to do everything itself. This just happens to resonate well with Microsoft's approach.

Microsoft tries, it really does, to do the web bit but its efforts always make users of Internet Explorer into first class citiizens. Other software publishers can manage rich text editing (for example) in multiple browsers, so why doesn't Microsoft? Perhaps it tries but its culture doesn't make such things easy. The joining of the Yahoo! and Microsoft cultures might help with this sort of thing.

If this deal does go through, I can't help thinking that Microsoft will need a good supply of indigestion tablets and Yahoo! a stock of anti-depressants.