Microsoft bids for Yahoo!

I often stumble on things on the internet that I find interesting but not quite enough to blog about. Today there were two such things: Microsoft's $44B offer to buy Yahoo! and the above snapshot of two men on the verge of giving in to exquisite carnal bliss. I decided the parallels between the two ran deeper than one might expect.

As both a nerd and a software professional, I've always found Microsoft to be distasteful and corrosive. They habitually behave in a way that restricts consumer choice and competition. They use their dominant position in one market to preempt competition in other markets despite producing low quality goods. There's nothing so annoying to an engineer than seeing manipulation get in the way of an optimal solution.

Given a long enough timeline, however, markets prevail. The growing technical superiority of Linux on one end and the design and polish of Apple on the other have started to bring back some good old competition. Microsoft is still giant, but mortal. Today MSFT trades at $30.45 which is the same price some people paid for it all the way back in 1998! Bill Gates is rich but not getting much richer.

The most pressing concern for Microsoft now is Google. On the Internet, Microsoft's dominance on the desktop counts for little and they are faced with competitors that actually want to serve their customers rather than treat them as captives. Money and power can't 'fix' that, especially when none of the nerds want to come work for you due to your track record.

Yahoo! was a plucky startup that made a lot of good choices as the internet was coming of age and then some not so good ones. Over time, they lost much of their spark, uniqueness and customer focus and fell behind Google despite a big head start. Given these problems, I find it implausible that joining with super-bland Microsoft will provide any benefit or even slow the decline.

As a libertarian and not being particularly gullible I've always found George Bush to be distasteful and corrosive. He trades in fear rather than reason and has no respect for civic debate or the rule of law. He completely disregards the half of the country that didn't vote for him and then went the extra step of disregarding many of the people who did vote for him, too. Over time his flaws caught up with him, leaving him politically weakened and discredited but still a viable force for his remaining year in office.

John McCain was a plucky politician at a time when people were growing tired of partisan politics. A maverick. Engineer of the Straight Talk Express. Respected for being above the fray. Over time he lost his independence. He became a cheerleader for the debacle that is the occupation of Iraq. Now he tells the public that the Surge is working and that he is prepared to dig into a hundred year war there. Yet even now our soldiers are dying at a rate of 'just' one a day. So expect another 350 deaths under Bush and 1500 under McCain were he to get four years in the White House. So much for the Straight Talk Express.

Well, it's late and I don't want to stretch this post's metaphor any further or invest time in the kind of tie-it-all-together concluding paragraph they teach you about in Composition 101. Plus my readers from the road trip posts are tired of me blabbing about politics by now. Peace out.