For many Yahoo employees, the prospect that Microsoft might acquire the quirky Silicon Valley icon is about as appealing as a bad case of hives. One Yahoo engineer confessed his apprehension at trading in his Sunnyvale purple for Redmond's muted hues this way: "The shareholders will be jumping for joy. But, for us, this is the frosting on a giant double-layer suck cake."

Granted, Yahoos have been through a hard time lately, enduring several years of Terry Semel's ineffectual management (for which he got paid nearly half a billion), then watching as company's stock price dove into the toilet early this year. So for some employees, last Friday's roughly 50 percent run-up in YHOO's stock price was a welcome relief. And there's the promise of vesting stock and engineer retention bonuses to help ease the potential transition, as blogger Greg Sterling points out.

Still, enthusiasm for the deal seems low based on Yahoos' public comments. Executive Bradley Horowitz posted a Twitter message Friday morning reading just "ooooookaaaaay...."

And when Yahoo engineer Jeremy Zawodny posted a screenshot of the Techmeme page compiling the list of news coverage of the Yahoo/Microsoft deal on his personal blog, he added a note predicting that Friday would be one of Yahoo employees' "least productive days since 9/11."

Meanwhile, within Microsoft, people are mostly sitting tight. According to the anonymous author of the Mini Microsoft blog, who purports to be a Microsoft employee, most Microsofties are taking a wait-and-see approach. "There's no way this is happening fast," the blogger writes. "Microsofties in groups most affected by a Yahoo! acquisition are plowing ahead, course unchanged, for the foreseeable future. No thoughts around brand or collaboration or nada."