Microsoft has officially pulled is Yahoo offer. In my mind furthering their already huge plunge into the dark waters of irrelevancy. No large company in their right mind would want to merge with Microsoft at this point. Firstly, Balmer is no Gates. Balmer reminds me of an angry junior high school teacher who is trying to make himself feel important by bulling the kids. Well this time the kids stood up for themselves.

I don't even understand why Yahoo was attractive to Microsoft in the first place. Anything useful from Yahoo would be killed by the Microsoft's culture. You can't "borg" Yahoo. It just wouldn't make any sense for a "Windows Only" company to take over a company like Yahoo that has used so much open source to fuel its features. While I'm not exactly a Yahoo fan either, I think their open source usage and support is to be commended.

I don't think Microsoft's leadership is capable of understanding Yahoo's technology choices or supporting them after a merger. If they aren't buying them for their technology, what else would they buy them for? If its for their users, then they would be in for a horrid shock. After killing their services with "Microsoft" technology and idiotic marketing shams, how many users would be left? I guess the scariest thing is that Microsoft's leadership actually thought this was a remotely good idea. It just shows the complete level of delusion of its leadership.

Microsoft needs to turn things around and quick. They need some real leadership and understanding about operating systems and what users really need. They can limp along with Vista and Office 2007, but the bloat and fluff in those products cannot be continued. It looks to me like their board had better do some ousting and bring in some people from the outside to bring about a real seachange. What needs to be done at MS can't be done from the inside. These are the same people that gave us the mess to begin with. They can't be counted on to admit they they totally messed up and suddenly start doing everything differently.

I'd start with Balmer, but then again, I'm just a peon in the technology world. What do I know anyways.

Apple was very successful in moving towards using an open source base OS and virtualizing for all the old stuff. Why not take a BSD base and write a Microsoft Windows manager (like KDE
or Gnome) that won't require 1gb of RAM and a huge video card just to
make pretty things float around the screen? Frankly they could just skin one of them.

Considering that I can run many Windows apps faster on the same maching using Wine in Linux (I was just playing some City of Heroes and Half-Life 2 in Wine), why not fully participate in the WINE and Mono projects? Why not make all of your current base of Win32 apps run in native .NET with Mono, WINE, or full emulation (slower but would at least be guarenteed to work)?

If that is in place (Its closer everyday even without the help of Microsoft), then Microsoft could start rewriting all of their apps as cross platform apps that leverage open standards and don't rely on the cruddy Win32 API. 

Alas, instead of working to make their products better, they seem to be stuck in monopolist mode still. They could have made Office 2007 work with the Open Document ISO standard. Instead they gamed the system and have pratically ruined the ISO reputation in the process. Instead of making a great OS, they created an embaresment that was so bad they decided to lie to their customers about what level hardware it would run on. They spent a ton of time baking in horrid freedom stealing features for DRM and building annoying "pretend" security warnings. Instead they could have used their pull to make consumer's lives better and not worse.

And now, instead of fixing their completely broken and tattered products that are supposed to make all of their money, they are wasting time trying to compete with Google with a failed and embarassing purchase of Yahoo. I suppose they could decide to try for a hostile take over. That would be the Balmer angry junior high gym teacher thng to do. I suppose if that happens it really will be the either be the beginning of the end of Microsoft, or it will hasten some huge changes in leadership after it fails miserablly (and it will) and Microsoft can get back to fixing its core competencies.