Shiva lives in Silicon Valley

This column has an interesting take on the whole Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo: "Yahoo, founded by Stanford graduate students who became media darlings and instant billionaires after an exhilarating initial public offering of stock, may be the next to disappear. And Yahoo, which is based in Sunnyvale, Calif., is only 13 years old. Microsoft wants to buy the company for $44.6 billion as its way to compete with Google, the hot company of this decade, which was also founded by Stanford graduate students who became media darlings and instant billionaires after an exhilarating initial public offering.
“This is the very nature of the Valley,” said Jim Breyerof the venture capital firm Accel Partners. “After very strong growth, businesses by definition start to slow as competition increases and young creative start-ups begin to attack the incumbents.” The economist Joseph Alois Schumpeter had a name for this principle of capitalism: creative destruction. Perhaps nowhere does it play out more dramatically — and more rapidly — than in Silicon Valley, where innovation unleashes a force that creates and destroys, over and over."

This column, too: "Microsoft said it wants to give users choice and stop Google from unfairly dominating the search marketplace. Krans found that an interesting argument coming from Microsoft, since others have accused it of dominating operating systems and other software markets for some time. "Once the shoe's on the other foot, it's a different story," he said.