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A long time ago someone said to me: "When the parent becomes threatened by the child, the stage is set for a Greek tragedy."

If reports are to be believed, that's playing out right now in San Diego, where Karin Winner, the editor of the decaying and decrepit Union-Tribune, has engineered the exit of Chris Jennewein and Ron James, two of the best online guys in the newspaper business. Not the first time this has happened. And sadly, probably not the last.

The newspaper's audience in-market penetration has sagged to 54%, while the website has added 17.2%, according to the latest ABC data. In addition, the website has built a separate national audience/revenue proposition (out-of-market usage is not measured by ABC) based on inbound tourism. So the response is for the newsroom to seize control and oust the growth guys. Dumb.

If the world unfolded as predicted by Bill Gates, printed newspapers would be dead in the next four years. While he may turn out to have been directionally correct and merely wrong about the timing, it's been interesting to watch the world change around Microsoft and slowly render the software giant impotent at a time when newspapers continue to hang around and even start new print publications.

While it is surely premature to pronounce dead a company with a 263.2 billion USD market capitalization, the writing is on the wall: the era of the PC has ended. The Web is the center of the universe and the PC is just one of many peripherals.

Now Microsoft is saying that openly. After a series of high-profile failures (PlaysForSure, Zune, and now Vista) from Redmond, it needs to change its way of thinking from top to bottom to embrace Web services. (This is why it wants to buy Yahoo, an effort that I think will fail even if it succeeds.)

The problem is that MS has no particular advantage as a service provider -- other than mountains of available cash to fund development, which often is not the advantage you might expect. On the minus side, it has a demonstrated track record of incompetency and inability to stick with an idea long enough to make it work.

Just this week Microsoft told people who made purchases from its failed MSN Music online store that "as of August 31, 2008, we will no longer be able to support the retrieval of license keys for the songs you purchased from MSN Music or the authorization of additional computers."

Microsoft is surrounded by smart, more agile competitors, many of which have nothing to lose. As we move from desktop to mobile-centric Internet access, free Linux -- especially in the form of the Google-financed Android project -- will be the dominant platform. This will lead to an explosion of small-scale disruptive, innovative development, overwhelming Microsoft like an attack of fire ants.

Is there any value to newspapers in studying this, other than misery loving company?

I think it illuminates two options for newspaper companies, which are in many ways in the same trap as Microsoft.

One path is to embrace and leverage processes modeled on the principles of "open source" development, as Google is doing. This requires abandoning the arrogant hostility toward the reader that you find in many newsrooms, banning the language "unwashed masses" from thought as well as conversation. The Founding Fathers referred to "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind," a concept disturbingly absent among many journalists who are eager to latch onto other concepts expressed in that era, such as freedom of the press.

The other path is suggested by a line generally attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald: "The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody." This essentially is Apple's path, the closed system where value is created through enforced simplicity and clarity. But can newspapers cleverly express anything? The quality of writing, and the quality of thought, in most of America's 1,400 or so newspapers is not encouraging.

My rule of thumb is a simple one: Use the right tool for the right job. The Internet's strength is collaborative interaction; print's strengths are linearity, focus and serendipitous discovery.

So in my world newspapers should use the Internet to execute a Google-like, open-source-inspired, conversational approach to journalism, while remaking print around focus, quality, depth and thought-provoking discovery. I'm troubled when I see newspapers trying to badly copy the Web's strengths into print (i.e. those awful Page 2 summaries of news you already know about) and failing to invest in journalism worth reading.

So in my vision of the future, the Web is not exactly the center of the media universe. It's one of the centers, and it's optimized for open interaction and community-driven conversation. Print should focus on our need for periodic escape from the cacophony of the bazaar. If we do that, perhaps newspapers will still be around for awhile. Maybe even longer than Microsoft. Who knows?

"If the only tool you have is a hammer," said psychologist Abraham Maslow, "you tend to see every problem as a nail." I thought about that as I examined a couple of recently launched websites: The Industry Standard and NotchUp, both of which bear the "beta" label acknowledging their concepts are only partially baked.

The original Industry Standard was a business magazine aimed at the magical new economy that was being created by the Internet. It went dot-poof when the first dot-boom turned out to be a dot-bubble that dot-burst.

The new Industry Standard is a website, but it's not an online magazine. While it has some news and opinion that a writer would recognize, it's really a "prediction market" that attempts to capture and wisdom from the community. You "bet" on positions, such as "Yahoo to accept Microsoft acquisition." If you're right, you win virtual money that gives you a more powerful voice in future "betting." In theory, the result is a powerful indicator, like the stock market.

NotchUp is an employment marketplace built not around scarcity of jobs, but scarcity of good candidates from specific jobs. The big twist on the usual "post your resume and get a job" offer is that NotchUp promises to charge the potential employer for the contact information and pay you for the interview.

You also get some sort of percentage on anyone you recruit to join the system, a viral marketing trick that explains why I got a blizzard of invites over two or three days.

Both of these sites, interestingly, are built on the open-source Drupal CMS platform. This gets us back to the point about Maslow's hammer. Given the same toolkit, how would a newspaper company respond? For that matter, how many cutting-edge Web 2.0 pundits would have built the usual blog-centric presentation, with maybe a little bit of sweet Ajax goodness thrown in?

We are all subject to the Maslow's hammer effect.

I'll leave it to others to comment on the potential impact on the newspaper industry of the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo takeover.

I'm interested in how Microsoft may be faced with a choice: Change who you are in a very fundamental way, or destroy both Yahoo and yourself in the process.

That is the very choice facing newspapers today, and we might learn something by considering how this takeover might play out.

Why does Microsoft want Yahoo, anyway? Here's why: It's four o'clock in the afternoon for the Microsoft software empire. At four o'clock there's plenty of daylight left, but night is on the way.

That's the way it is for Microsoft, which built its lock-in software empire in an economy of scarcity (and some shady business practices). Despite all of Microsoft's efforts, scarcity in the software world is disappearing.

The Internet is responsible for that. It made possible the open collaboration by volunteers and independent companies that created Linux, Apache, an array of free database servers, free programming languages like PHP and Python, and ultimately competitors like Google who are making the old world of desktop software and desktop operating systems largely irrelevant.

The cool stuff is on the Web, not the desktop, and we don't need Microsoft for that. This is the nightmare that Microsoft has been fighting from the start, the reason it opposed the open Internet from the start, the reason it suffocated Netscape at the start.

So it's four o'clock, and Microsoft knows it has just a few more years to move from being desktop-centric to being a Web-centric business that's more like media company.

Its own efforts (MSN) have been a mixture of serial failures and very marginal successes, so something big has to be done now.

But here's the danger: Microsoft's DNA would be poison to Yahoo. Instead, Microsoft needs an injection of Yahoo's DNA. It's unlikely to accept that.

Microsoft's internal value system tells it to tie everything together in order to defend the core. Defending the core, as we in the newspaper business have finally begun to understand, ultimately prevents you from innovating.

Instead of embracing open standards, it peddles second-rate proprietary tools like ActiveX, Silverlight, and the ill-fated "Plays For Sure" audio system, all intended to lock consumers into a Microsoft-only solution. Instead of competing on merit, it tries to prevent licensees from supporting other standards.

What a contrast is Yahoo. Like most successful Web companies, Yahoo built its business on open-source tools like OpenBSD. Rasmus Lerdorf, who invented PHP, works there, and Yahoo is probably the largest single user of PHP in the world. Yahoo contributes heavily to open-source projects, hosts open-source conferences, promotes open standards and gives away its own code. It's not perfect, but it's almost a mirror image of Microsoft.

Yahoo doesn't need an injection of Microsoft, but Microsoft could use an injection of Yahoo. Will it take the medicine? I doubt it. Like a newspaper taking over an entrepreneurial dotcom startup, I fully expect Microsoft to destroy everything that's open and creative about Yahoo, driving away its best talent and its most loyal users.

It should raise some eyebrows that MySQL AB, the Swedish maker of a free database management system, has sold itself to Sun Microsystems at a price that Cnet estimates at (begin Dr. Evil impersonation) one... billion ... dollars. Hopefully it also will open some minds about alternative business models and "low end" innovation.

MySQL's revenue model is best described as "voluntary pay." Anybody can download and use the software at no charge. Businesses are encouraged to sign up for support services, but that's completely optional.

The "voluntary pay" model isn't unique to software; quite a weekly newspapers use it, and some dailies are beginning to experiment with a mix of free and paid circulation that effectively is "voluntary pay" for targeted neighborhoods. It's an intriguing option for a print medium that lets the newspaper control its distribution while continuing to enjoy some of the revenue benefits of the old model.

In the music business, Radiohead stirred things up by offering their latest album as a free "pay what you want, if you want" download. Of course, other music businesses such as Magnatune have long offered unusual pricing models. Magnatune lets you listen online all you want, and pay a price of your own choosing to download files.

And in Kirkland, WA -- the east side of the Seattle area -- there's even a coffeeshop and deli founded by a Google programmer that seems to be surviving on a voluntary-pay basis. The wi-fi is free, too.

The MySQL deal also is significant because MySQL is a perfect example of a low-end disruptive innovation.

You don't have to stir the anthill very much to discover that a lot of highly paid, highly trained Oracle database administrators regard MySQL as junk, a toy, beneath consideration. Blah blah constraints, blah blah referential integrity, blah blah transaction rollback.

But MySQL was "good enough" to create entirely new markers and enable entirely new services, including this blog, which sits atop a MySQL data store. And as MySQL improved, it began displacing expensive solutions in increasingly more mission-critical settings.

Now it's the engine behind Google AdSense, which of course is the revenue engine behind Google itself. Good enough, and then some.

The Miami Herald has killed a project to outsource editorial production of a zoned section to workers in India. Good move. It was a bad idea in the first place. Next they should kill the idea of outsourcing website comment monitoring, which is a rich source of leads and perspective that can help journalists reconnect with the real world.

But outsourcing can be a good idea. The criteria for outsourcing are simple:

• It's not a competitive advantage to retain the work in-house. (This is where the Miami Herald erred. Editorial judgment is a key competitive advantage.)
• There's a financial advantage to outsourcing.
• External sources sources are reliable and competent in meeting your current and future needs.

Some examples:

The Chicago Sun-Times has outsourced some delivery to the Chicago Tribune, its direct competitor. Delivery is delivery is delivery. The San Francisco Chronicle is outsourcing its printing. So are many other dailies. Commercial printing typically runs an operating margin in the low single digits. Is that the business you want to be in? Many papers have outsourced classified advertising and circulation call centers. (Key question: Is the vendor competent?)

But what about the Internet? The same rules apply. Most software is a commodity, and in fact open source solutions meet most of your needs -- so don't reinvent the wheel. Hosting? Look at how Web 2.0 startups are taking advantage of Amazon EC2 and S3 tools. Design? Only the largest companies may be able to cost-justify maintaining the depth of expertise necessary to do quality site design work; even the Washington Post is hiring an outside firm for its major redesign.

A common consulting workshop exercise is to ask participants to design a competitor: If someone handed you X million dollars to compete with your current employer, what would you do? Answering that question can illuminate some paths you should take in your current job. If you spend some time thinking like a Web startup, designing a virtual company where everything is outsourced, you may come to some startling conclusions.

Disruptive innovations, in the Clayton Christensen model, typically represent a "leap down" rather than an improvement in technology. And sometimes the result might seem to be a toy, beneath serious notice.

Here are some examples: the ASUS EEE ($349 from Amazon.com), the Everex Cloudbook ($399 from Wal-Mart later this month) and the XO from the One Laptop Per Child project, which you can't actually buy but theoretically costs somewhere between $150 and $300.

Toys, all of them. They don't even run Windows and can't run Vista. Their displays are only 800 pixels wide, not enough for most of today's sprawling website designs (particularly news sites). The XO and EEE don't even have hard drives.

But they come with their own set of advantages, starting with ultraportability. Take a look at Mindy McAdams' photos of the XO. Slip one into a backpack and you'll not even notice it's there. They all run Linux, which is virus-free and spyware-free, and highly reliable. They can put the Internet in new hands and new places.

So while the mainstream might consider these insufficient and underpowered, the EEE actually ranked as the "most wished for" computer on Amazon.com this Christmas season. And the best-selling? It was the Nokia N800, currently $231.49, an 800-pixel Linux-powered handheld "toy."

It's no wonder, then, that Microsoft and Intel, which are completely shut out of this phenomenon, are suddenly taking notice. There are reports of Intel trying to torpedo major government buys of XO laptops and Microsoft suddenly deciding Windows XP will live on, after all, as an installable "upgrade" for the XO.

But the disruptive potential of these ultraportable Linux laptops isn't limited to technology companies. Textbook publishing, entertainment broadcasting, record companies and government-controlled mass media all around the world are going to be upended. We've already seen in the United States the beginnings of what widespread Internet access can do to old media. You ain't seen nuthin' yet.