Maybe bad for the world, but clearly good for Share!Holders!
Those critical of the deal and saying Yahoo board is right to reject it miss the basics of public companies board duties.
And this has nothing to do with the degree of anti-microsoft they, or anyone here, may have (and I'm far from being last in microsoft-bashing and -hating)
Board members and managers of a public company have two, and only two, duties:
1- Respect the laws and ensure their company respects them
2- Maximize the value of the EXISTING shareholders investment.
They have no right to care about the future of a Microhoo company, in fact they have a duty to absolutely and completely ignore it.
What they must do is do anything they can to have their existing shareholders get richer.
Microsoft is offering $44 billion. I don't care what the future will look like for microhoo.
The only question is: will the current shareholder be richer if Yahoo stays independent for the next 5 years and he sells then, or will he be richer if the deal is done, and that shareholder cashes out and buys American Tresaury bonds with a 5-year remaining maturity with the money?
If allowing the shareholder to cash out is better for that shareholder, then the board is legally bound to accept the offer, even if it means yahoo is destroyed in the process, and 1 billion people migrate to google as a result.
It's not their problem, and if they care more about the company itself than about the owners of the said company, they will rightly end up very poor, or even in jail.
To sum this up, if Jerry Yang was the owner of yahoo, he would probably be right to reject the offer: it's his baby, he doesn't want to see it die, even if he would be richer by killing it. But he's not the owner of yahoo, nor is any boardmember, alone or collectively with the others. As a consequence, if killing yahoo brings more money, the law mandates they actively and quickly kill the company they manage.