Yahoo!'s Dead! Anyway! & M$ Haters Are Disingenuous.
I'm pretty sure that the moment Yahoo! signed a deal with Google, was the moment that Yahoo! threw in the towel as a separate entity. Portals are dead, Yahoo is a distant runner-up in search, free e-mail is ubiquitous, free IM is ubiquitous; and now they are paying Google to serve up ad revenue. I'm pretty sure the intelligent stock holders heard the toilet flush / sense the circular motion towards sewer. FYI - Corporations don't exist to serve the employees or the product users/buyers. The exist to serve the stockholders. That may suck in your opinion, but welcome to capitalism. If you live in the west, your alternatives are accept reality or move to a commune (without computers). If you are a Yahoo shareholder and aren't pissed about the lack of sale, then you are probably a pretty poor investor (or to be fair - a Yahoo employee afraid of losing their job after sale to M$ would have a legitimate out). Frankly, companies make plenty of stupid long-term operation decisions based on the need to make numbers to satisfy the current quarter, but that is also the nature of capitalism. When you open your company up to public investment, then you should expect to serve the whim of the stock holders.
I also find it freaking hillareous that whenever an article includes anything related to M$, the comments become a vent fest for how aweful Microsoft is. I've worked for and with quite a few different corporations - once they are of a certain size, they are all self-serving, winner take-all monoliths. Why? Because you have to be that way to become a large corporation. M$ is no more evil than Apple, Intel, IBM, GE, etc. ;> - which is to say they are all evil, life-sucking, vampires, but again - welcome to capitalism. Right now IMHO, Apple is twice as evil as M$ - based on their perfection in sheep-herding marekting-based capitalism alone (look at the the plethra of iNamed devices and tell me whether the sales are driven by innovation or by really really good marketing - I think taking advantage of people through marketing is evil, but hey that's opinion right?). Quit bitching about M$ if you aren't going to bitch about every other major corporation - they all suck in some readily identifiable way. (Just in case someone mentions google in the flames - "Do No Harm" - ROFLCOPTER).
Anyway, why hate M$? Even if Bill and Co. hadn't stolen the GUI from Apple, which stole the GUI from Xerox, people would have trended to one major OS sooner or later - it makes life easier. VHS beat Beta, Blueray won out, etc. Someone sooner or later was going to be ruthless enough capture the mass user's attention - if you like capitalism, you can't hate M$ for being the most successful marketer.
Bill w/ Halo - Because I enjoy annoying the M$ haters - just on principle if nothing else.