Microsoft is a company in transition.  Despite the very vocal and very loud ramblings of MS haters in the online world, Ballmer and Co. employ some fairly intelligent and forward thinking people.  Take, for example, their new marketing stance towards college students.  In November, MS began to sell Office Ultimate 2007 to college students with a valid .edu email address for a paltry $60.  Retail versions hover between $500 and $700, and I don't doubt that MS converted a very large number of college-aged Office pirates into legitimate customers with the sweatheart deal, aptly named "The Ultimate Steal."

Ballmer followed this up with DreamSpark, a Microsoft website offering completely free and totally legitimate versions of Visual Studios 2008, Windows Server 2003, and MS Expression Studio to any currently enrolled college student with a valid .edu email address.  But why would Microsoft give away $500 - $3000 software packages to the one demographic that has likely been the most egregious software piracy offender?  

Microsoft can see the writing on the wall — the future belongs to the Internet, and it will be written not by Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison or Bill Gates but rather by today's teens/young adults who view television the same way my generation viewed record players.  These kids furiosuly tap away on their tiny qwerty-equipped text-phones, dilligently manage their MySpace/Facebook profiles, and get blank stares across their faces when asked to consider a world without the Web.

What better way to keep your product relevant than to give it away to the only people who can maintain its relevance in the future?

Yahoo!, on the other hand, appears to employ vapid and nostalgic lovers of past history.  Although Yahoo! once maintained an enormous pile of relevance and innovative stock, the current company is but a shell of its former self.  The king of online marketing, search advertising, belongs without question to Yahoo!'s master and mortal enemy, Google, and without the ability to utilize that for which it is known (Yahoo!, surprisingly, was once a popular search engine), Yahoo!'s left with an empty bag and lots of angry shareholders.  

Instead of taking a long, hard look at its broken business model and optionless future, Yahoo! stubbornly refused to admit that 1998 ended a decade ago when its founder, Jerry Yang, turned down Microsoft's near-$50 billion purchase offer.  Ballmer was Yang's last real hope of keeping Yahoo! from becoming bunkmates with AOL in int3rw3b hell, and I'm fairly certain that Microsoft just saved itself from making a $50 billion mistake.  Yahoo, indeed.        

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