The night Microsoft died

I'm sure every other blogger on the 'net has written about how stupid Jerry Yang is. I know there was a shareholder lawsuit in the works before the board voted. I'm going to stick my neck out here and opine that Microsoft needed Yahoo! more than Yahoo! needed Microsoft, and that Ballmer et al are the ones who blinked, or worse, didn't get it.

Does anyone on this lovely little Earth actually think that Microsoft sans Bill Gates is going to be more than, say, DEC without Ken Olsen? Everyone who thinks Ray Ozzie is going to lead Microsoft into the next generation of greatness raise their lower left tentacles.

Microsoft has been desperately trying to get "online" for 13 years now, and so far has flopped at everything they touch. Even the things they do well in the product world tend to suck in the online world. They just can't grasp the whole essence of "less is more." For a funny example of what I mean, see this funny video.

Only time will tell, and I don't think the road ahead is going to be all that pretty for Yahoo! The descriptions I hear of the company, from both inside and out, tell of a company bloated with competing divisions, layers of useless competing management, and money and talent and energy wasted on many things that don't get used by customers or generate revenue, but Yahoo! is still one of the bellweathers of what the Internet is becoming. Yahoo! shop sites are one of the easiest ways of creating an Internet business and they have thousands and thousands of them. Their expertise in Internet marketing, aka "banner ads," is so great that even Google pairs with them in this area.

Microsoft, by comparison, has their hapless MSDN and utterly useless Windows Live non-brands. They just keep missing the whole Internet revolution, watching it pass them by. Rots of ruck, guys.