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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?

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.

I already hate Windows Vista, and I'm not even running it.

My mother, who lives in Missouri, has decided to finally plug into the Internet. She bought a laptop, which came with Microsoft's latest operating system, and ordered a DSL line from her local phone company. A relative managed to get the DSL modem and wireless hub configured yesterday after a bit of telephone consultation.

So today she's trying to browse the Internet, and she's having troubles.

Microsoft has made such a buggered-up mess of the IE7 user interface, which looks like something a teenager designed as a Winamp skin, that I can't even help her over the phone. And regardless of what Microsoft claims, Internet Explorer is a bugwad just asking to be infected by a virus.

Solution? Install Firefox.

She managed to find Google, run a search for Firefox, and click on all the right link to make the download happen. But Vista won't let her install it, popping up an alert that it's not digitally signed by Microsoft.

Signed by Microsoft?

As has been noted, that's not security. It's business terrorism -- frightening the user in order to protect Microsoft's business interests. This sort of nonsense doesn't happen on OSX and Linux, which simply require the user to confirm the installation with a password.

I swear, next time I get up there I'm going to wipe the hard drive and install Ubuntu Linux, Picasa, Abiword, Firefox and Thunderbird.

It's been something like six months since the launch of the Times Reader, which I dissed as Microsoft's deja-vision of the future. Now Hearst, which owns the troubled Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has lined up with the dark side, announcing its own downloadable reader. Similar announcements have come from Forbes and London's Daily Mail.

Silicon Valley VC Alan Mutter rightly calls this a case of "trying to jam the square peg of the traditional print product into the round hole of the Internet."

In Clayton Christensen's terminology, this is not only cramming, but overshooting.

Cramming is the act of forcing an old product or business model into a new technological framework, rather than exploiting the new framework for its unique possibilities. Christensen writes: "The problem with cramming is that it changes the innovation in ways that obviate its inherent disruptive energy. It takes an innovation from a circumstance in which its unique features are valuable to a circumstance in which its unique features are a liability.

"Cramming is like trying to stuff a square peg into a round hole. "

As for overshooting, that's the act of "improving" a product in ways that exceed the marketplace's ability to absorb the "improvement." Microsoft is all puffed up about its newfound ability to hand extraordinary typographical control over to the publisher. The problem is that readers are not crying out for better type kerning from an "online newspaper." That's really, really not the problem.

I'm an RSS addict. Once you have an RSS reader set up, it's easy to get addicted. But RSS is still a fringe technology, used by a small percentage of the population. Why? Because it's broken. Getting better, but still broken.

The broken part has nothing to do with the competing standards -- RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 (which has nothing to do with 1.0), Atom, et cetera. That's behind-the-scenes stuff and users don't need to care.

The broken part is the subscription mechanism. It's too complicated.

The new round of Web browsers promises to fix that, and Firefox 2.0 actually does. Internet Explorer 7 claims to have two-click subcription capability, but Microsoft has screwed it up, again. Here's what I get when I try click on an RSS icon in Internet Explorer 7:

Apparently this is what passes for usability these days on the troubled Redmond campus. "Internet Explorer requires you to have MSXML3 SP5 or greater in order to view feeds." Huh?

This makes me think of a whole series of additional acronyms, most of them representing obscenities.

What I should see is what Firefox 2 shows me. It transforms the XML feed into a formatted preview and adds a subscription tool at the top. It offers me a choice of popular Web-based readers, or any RSS reader application I've installed on my computer, or Firefox 2's built-in but primitive RSS reader (a dropdown menu). Select, hit OK, and off you go.

I don't understand why Microsoft is so screwed up as a company.

Buying anything from Microsoft is like buying a suit of clothing, then discovering the next day that one pants leg is sewed on inside-out, the zipper is in the back, and the jacket has three arms, and if you don't immediately acquire and install 39 upgrades, a horde of pickpockets will steal your wallet and your car keys.

You have to wonder whether they actually use any of their software.

On the feed side, most of the blogging platforms have finally gotten around to implementing feeds as a standard feature, but it's not well explained to the bloggers. According to the Pew Internet and American Life project:

"Nearly 6 in 10 (59%) say they do not have an RSS feed for their blog content, and close to another quarter (23%) say they do not know if they had a feed, or did not answer the question. It is worth noting that bloggers are not behind the curve when it comes to this new technology. In a general internet-user survey conducted in May-June 2005 only 9% of internet users said they have a good idea of the meaning of the term 'RSS feeds.'"