Microsoft is down 6% in after hours. I'm a little surprised since the results look reasonably good.

Quoted: Microsoft's revenue rose 18 percent for both its fiscal 2008 fourth quarter and year, but the company's Online Services Business (OSB), under scrutiny due to heated negotiations to purchase Yahoo's search business, continues to falter.

Quoted: On his final full day at Microsoft Corp., Bill Gates went on stage to reminisce with his longtime friend Steve Ballmer, and neither man could hold back tears as Ballmer handed Gates a large scrapbook as a farewell present.
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One of those will be Web search, where Microsoft lags far behind Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. in market share. With an acquisition of Yahoo now again apparently off the table, Gates threw his weight Friday behind a strategy of assembling a team of smart people and combining Microsoft's own breakthroughs with what competitors are already doing.

For all you Mac cult members...

Quoted: Furthermore, beyond the OS itself, I hate the cult of personality that surrounds Steve Jobs. I like the soon-to-be-retired Bill Gates way more than Steve Jobs, because the guy cares about more than just making enough money to build a castle for himself out of stacks of $100 bills (not that Bill can't do that).

There must be more to their business than searching Wikipedia.

Quoted: VentureBeat is reporting that Microsoft has agreed to buy semantic search engine Powerset for somewhere around $100 million, which is the price we previously reported was being offered to the company.

My friend just left MS to co-found this company. Looks like they help you deploy Office Communications Server (OCS) and Exchange.

Quoted: Helping you deploy the world's leading platform for Unified Communications.
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A contrarian view.

Quoted: They may need new leadership to do that. But selling this asset to Microsoft just because they had the wrong leadership and probably still have the wrong leadership is a mistake.

Quoted: Microsoft trades at a healthy 4.55 times sales. So every $1 in the acquired company is theoretically worth $4.55. Pretty profitable business, these acquisitions, no? Unfortunately for the Redmond Boys, the GOOG can turn that $1 into $10.17. To over simplify things, they can afford to pay twice as much as Microsoft and still come out ahead.

It does feel like Microsoft's main gameplan in the consumer Web space over the last couple years has been to play catchup.

Quoted: So let's assume that Google has won at search, or close enough to make no difference. Is Microsoft better off trying to reimplement cat and ls, or trying to figure out what's still missing from the Internet Operating System? While they are locked in penis envy, all the really cute girls are going out with startups :-)
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I just noticed we're mentioned -- but with our old name, Blue Dot -- in this Yahoo News article about Microsoft's social bookmarking tool.

Quoted: Among the more popular social bookmarking services that have sprung up are Reddit, del.icio.us and Digg. Other popular entrants include Blue Dot and Diigo.