Because for a plan like this to work, real scarcity must be created. As information consumers, people like me would go to Google, search for something, not find it, and then go to Bing. Or, ideally, from the newspaper industry point of view, we would sign up for paid access. But there's no way this can be pulled off if just a few major publishers ask Google to stop indexing their sites. It will require a preponderance. Maybe Microsoft has enough cash to pay the entire media industry to pull out of Google, but I somehow doubt it.

For the plan to work, it will also require that the vast, endlessly proliferating ecology of Internet filters, such as the millions of bloggers or tweeters or Facebook posters who recommend or summarize news stories, are eradicated from the Net. When searching for news, I'd rather find the original Associated Press article breaking a story, but in a pinch I will settle for a summary. The pathways in which information flows on the Internet are near infinite, and until now, have always been expanding in size and scope. I have paid subscriptions to the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, but I rarely have time to sit down and devour the daily publications from "front" to "back." I depend on a network of my own Internet filters to tell me what is important or newsworthy -- without them, there is simply too much out there for me to comprehend or absorb.

Microsoft and News Corp want to solve my information overload problem by cutting off the firehose. This reminds one of nothing so much as King Canute attempting to turn back the tide (and yes, I know, he was really just trying to demonstrate God's infinite power as opposed to his puny mortal abilities). In other words, for Bing to dethrone Google or News Corp. to reverse the trend of declining newspaper circulation requires the outright reversal of history. Since at least the mid-'90s, the end users and consumers of information have lived in an environment where every single day offered us more -- more choices, more information, more content of all kinds. Let us recall, newspapers didn't make their content freely available on the Web because they were forced to by Google or anyone else -- they did it because anyone with a brain could see that's where the readers were going. We led -- they followed! They had no choice if they wanted to remain relevant. Readers now have such a bewildering infinity of choices upon which to devote their attention spans that one has to offer a really, really compelling service to make them pay for something.

Perhaps a duel between Google and Microsoft, in which both offer escalating sums of money to newspapers in a grab for searchable content, will be good for publishers, and make up for the decline in classified revenues and the broken monopolies on physical-location-based news provision. But fundamentally, what Microsoft and all the other newspapers looking to retreat from the free Web are banking on is that they can profit by reducing our access to information. Good luck with that.

Cloud computing refers to the model in which your data is stored online, in some vast server farm -- instead of on your desktop. Gmail or any other Web-based app is an example of the cloud computing model. Increasing numbers of us don't give a second thought to the idea of storing our photographs on Flickr or our documents at Google Docs and so on. But when a disaster of Sidekick proportions occurs -- your contact and calendar info, photos, etc., all gone with apparently no hope of recovery -- the calculus changes dramatically. It is, as InformationWeek's Eric Zeman dubbed it, "a code red cloud disaster." Sidekick users are furious, and T-Mobile is scrambling to make amends, and the very future viability of the Sidekick in the hotly contested smartphone market is in serious jeopardy.

Whom to blame? Danger, the company that created Sidekick, or Microsoft, which purchased Danger for $500 million 18 months ago? Felix Salmon theorizes that the fiasco came about in part because after Microsoft purchased Danger, the company buried the founders way down in the depths of the corporate bureaucracy. Salmon suggests that "It's pretty obvious that company founders aren't going to act with the same drive and sense of ownership when they're a tiny part of a monster organization as they did when they owned and ran their own shop."

But I have a competing theory. Traditionally, cloud computing has always been considered a threat to the classic Microsoft business model -- in which every desktop or laptop or netbook computer user is expected to purchase his or her own copy of Windows and Office. Maybe we should consider this a Machiavellian shot across Google's bow? What better way to defend the Windows/desktop franchise than to create a sense of fear, uncertainty and doubt concerning the fundamental security of cloud computing?

The protesters claim Verdana is ugly, dumbed down, and an insult to Ikea-fan sensibilities. But in a tough economy...

From Time:

So why would Ikea make such a change? The very ubiquity of Verdana seems to be part of the font's appeal. Freely distributed by Microsoft, the typeface allows Ikea to use the same font in all countries and with many alphabets. "It's more efficient and cost-effective," says Ikea spokeswoman Monika Gocic. "Plus, it's a simple, modern-looking typeface."

But in a world where people care deeply about font design, the watchwords of efficiency and cost-effectiveness carry little sway. Bucharest designer Iancu Barbarasa, a leader of the font rebellion, managed to simultaneously scoff at the decision and express a world-weary acceptance of the uncaring masses' inability to give a fig.

I doubt IKEA's sales dropped much during the crisis considering their target (take a look at McDonald's, they're booming), so jumping to a cheap, inappropriate typeface just because it's a bit cheaper on the short run seems to me like very bad management.

But, of course, nobody can tell for sure if it really matters. Sales may drop or may rise, but nobody will link them to a typeface. After all, most people can't tell the difference between serif and sans. For them it will be a change that never happened: "hasn't it been like this all the time?"

Which, come to think of it, will be exactly what most people will be saying ten years from now, if real health care reform actually passes.

Glyn Moody, writing in ComputerWorldUK, thinks the deal is expensive for Microsoft, but the advantages to the move are obvious. From a financial standpoint, Microsoft can now score bigger advertising deals. From a technical perspective, the key to improving search engine performance is crunching a lot of data on what people are searching for and using that information to refine results. Microsoft now has access to vastly more info on what people are looking for than ever before.

Bing already works pretty well, if your metric of success is that it returns Googlish-looking results. But I'm guessing that Google is unlikely to be alarmed. If anything, the news might even be welcomed by Google, as it shoots a big hole in the theory that Google is the 21st century version of Microsoft, lording it over the Internet universe without any significant competitors in sight.

For Yahoo, it all has to feel a little sad. Long ago, in the prehistory of the Web, as a freelance writer who was pretty excited about this thing called the Internet, I wrote a tiny little squib for Wired magazine, "Yippee for Yahoo," announcing the news that two graduate students at Stanford had received venture funding from Sequoia Capital. Back then, start-ups that got the Web like Yahoo were seen as the anti-Microsoft, and the fact that co-founder David Filo was a free-software geek made it all the better.

From now on, every Yahoo search result will be "powered by Bing."

For Jerry Yang and David Filo, that's gotta hurt.

It is a tribute to Google's extraordinary mindshare that the company's announcement of a new operating system that won't be available for another year spawned an instantaneous outpouring of over-the-top commentary so frenzied that I was immediately flung into a fit of browser-war flashbacks, circa 1995. Google is a much more formidable threat to Microsoft than Netscape ever was, but it is remarkable how similar the contours of the current explosion of hype are to the babble that preceded Netscape's astonishing IPO in August, 1995. The Web, we were told back then, was sure to dethrone Microsoft, and Netscape would be the flagbearer of the revolutionaries.

Netscape got stomped, of course, and Microsoft is still hanging around, dominating the vast majority of computers in use on the planet. So excuse me if I counsel wait-and-see to those who already are imagining Redmond as nothing more than a smoking crater oozing radioactive fallout.

And yet: Anyone old enough to remember the sturm und drang of 1995, but who pays attention to how kids are growing up on the Internet today, has to admit that that while Netscape and scores of other would-be Microsoft competitors lost all their battles, the Web is winning the war. My daughter's first step after turning on the computer is a trip to Facebook. My son's is to a Web-based online gaming network that connects him to all his friends. Both of them have Gmail accounts and neither particularly cares whether they are doing their homework in Google Docs online or Microsoft Word on the desktop. It's all the same to them.

Until the WiFi drops. At which point they become lost souls, cut loose from all online moorings. Dad! The Internet is broken. Fix it! Fix it! Fix it!

No matter what happens to the "Chrome" operating system, Google, so far, is on the right side of history -- provided there's ample Internet connectivity. Microsoft has always tried to figure out how to protect its established business model while venturing onto the Web. But Google is indigenous to the Web. When Microsoft gave away its browser free with every instance of Windows, it was considered an antitrust violation by competitors. But when Google says it plans to give away the entire operating system for free -- no one blinks. The real shocker would be if the company announced plans to charge for Chrome. (And yes, I know, the Justice Department is exploring whether there is a basis for an antitrust case against Google. But not because Google's consumer-facing products are free. That's just taken for granted.)

I will make no speculation as to whether the Chrome OS will succeed in grabbing market share from Microsoft. After all, my daughter wants a Mac Air and my son scoffs at anything that can't run the latest high-end PC game: (Translation: Windows). But they also assume that everything they need should be available to them, for free, when they turn on their computer. If it isn't Google, someone will deliver that to them.

And then there's this, from the original Google announcement:

We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear -- computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don't want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.

I've heard those promises before. I'm still waiting. But if Google delivers, the world is theirs. No nuclear bombs required.