Quoted: Rumors. Microsoft layoff and cut-backs and Reduction In Force rumors. That's all I have for you. Rumors and second-hand speculation and the comments left by the fine, good-looking folks who participate in the conversation here. So pour yourself some holiday cheer and dive in.

From the 'no shit' department: Yahoo!'s management is retarded.

Quoted: The downturn left Yahoo's market value nearly $13 billion below what shareholders would received if the Sunnyvale-based company had accepted Microsoft's takeover offer of $33 per share in May. Microsoft sweetened the offer after Yahoo repeatedly rejected an initial bid of $31 per share made in January.

Perhaps I'm biased because I like Seinfeld so much, but I thought the add was great.

Quoted: The software giant's new ad starring Jerry Seinfeld has draw largely negative reviews online after premiering Thursday night during NBC's broadcast of the National Football League's season kickoff game.

Quoted: One slogan that Microsoft shouldn’t use: “Vista – Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

Awesome. It's not the OS, it's the brand.

Quoted: Spurred by an e-mail from someone deep in the marketing ranks, Microsoft last week traveled to San Francisco, rounding up Windows XP users who had negative impressions of Vista. The subjects were put on video, asked about their Vista impressions, and then shown a "new" operating system, code-named Mojave. More than 90 percent gave positive feedback on what they saw. Then they were told that "Mojave" was actually Windows Vista.

Oh shit. File Format Frosh in now developing for Visual Studio.

Joel is pissed.

Quoted: Why I really care is that Microsoft is vacuuming up way too many programmers. Between Microsoft, with their shady recruiters making unethical exploding offers to unsuspecting college students, and Google (you're on my radar) paying untenable salaries to kids with more ultimate frisbee experience than Python, whose main job will be to play foosball in the googleplex and walk around trying to get someone...anyone...to come see the demo code they've just written with their "20% time," doing some kind of, let me guess, cloud-based synchronization... between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy because these companies are like cancers, driven to grow at all cost, even though they can't think of a single useful thing to build for us, but they need another 3000-4000 comp sci grads next week. And dammit foosball doesn't play itself.

Quoted: Back when Microsoft was riding high I was talking to Ballmer at some conference -- I have no idea where or when, but I'm sure he remembers exactly which conference this was and what day of the week it was and the number of the hotel room he stayed in -- and on that day somebody had just announced some huge anti-Borg merger, and all the idiots in the press were saying this was going to kill Microsoft, and Ballmer was just laughing. Laughing. Laughing his ass off. Ballmer said he loved when his rivals merged, because whenever the also-rans in any market start teaming up they might as well be waving a white flag. Because it's over. You've beaten them. You've driven them to despair. They haven't been able to beat you on their own; there's no way they'll do it together. Then he told me that line about the hundred-yard dash.

Quoted: Clearly, the browser wars are heating up to a level we haven't seen since the heady bubble days of the late 90's. That's good news for everyone who uses the web. Nothing drives innovation quite like competition.

Quoted: Given the level of fierce competition out there now, Microsoft must have some really killer features up their sleeves for Internet Explorer 8, right?