Stopped reading there. Nothing can stop the Microsoft juggernaut (except perhaps enforcement of antitrust laws). Yahoo wouldn’t be cashing out if they thought they were in a position to make a power play. Blogging, ’social networking,’ web 2.0… these things don’t matter, what matters is getting ad clicks from casual users (i.e. grandma as she’s going to play some poker or mah jong and maybe check out the pictures from the grandkids birthday on a horrible flickr page). MS wins here because some grandmas know and love their MSN mah jong, and some of them know and love their Yahoo mah jong… now MS has the revenue stream from both and the users aren’t even going to realize the difference.

Making money from the internet isn’t like the old days where savvy users take advantage of great things and pay top dollar for them. This isn’t 1999. Well, some of that happens, but the main scheme is to oversell and take advantage of casual, unsophisticated users. Look at the ISP’s- they oversell their bandwidth, you’ve got millions of grandmas paying for a 3mbps pipe and playing mah jong a couple times a week, maybe checking their email on the holidays. They’re so used to this model that you’ve AT&T pricing out usage caps on unlimited service- you’ve Comcast shutting down those users who use too much bandwidth (even on ‘unlimited’ plans); they do this because they know that the users who take full advantage of the service they pay for is only a small amount, maybe 5%. They’re concerned with the 95% who don’t know any better- those are the people that click here for a free ipod, you know. This Yahoo deal is the same thing.