I was appalled to hear of Microsoft's bid for Yahoo!

Back in the fall of 1995, with my brand new Gateway workstation, my very buggy Windows 95 operating system (crashed at least three times a day), I began looking for another ISP and e-mail host other than AOL.

Lo and behold, MSN was available, strongly recommended by Gate's entourage of slick ad people, er, "celebrities," who came forth and endorsed Windows 95 and MSN as the greatest union since Sampson and Delilah.

Lo and behold, they both stunk.

This launched me on a three year search of various ISPs and e-mail services until I discovered Yahoo!

Yahoo! has been outstanding, particularly it's free e-mail portion. I have tried other e-mail hosts since then, but I keep coming back to Yahoo!, as they GET IT RIGHT.

One of the biggest selling points for me was their committment to security and anti-spam. Neither MSN nor Google nor MindSpring nor the others I tried seemed very committed (and one was rather brazen about violating the privacy of those who use their services).

But all were better than MSN.

Now comes Microsoft, intending to buy Yahoo!

I can't help but wonder what's around the corner... Will Microsoft datamine my 9,374 e-mails sent and received over the years and sell the results to the highest bidder(s)? Will they sell my e-mail address and elminate the anti-spam features of Yahoo! to ensure continued sales of the e-mail addresses in the future? Will they force (er, "highly encourage") me to use more Microsoft products by disabling or crippling non-Microsoft products through Yahoo! and the next version of IE?

This bid might actually help Microsoft begin lumbering away from it's gross disorganization, lack of clarity, and near total non-functionality of it's many non-free online "services." It most certainly will NOT help the currently very sleek and highly functional Yahoo! remain that way for very long, and may very well force me to drop Yahoo!, possibly even the entire Microsoft operating system and software suite mafia altogether, and begin running some form of Linux along with a free office suite.