First we have this:

Areas such as India, China and the Middle East are betting on the sector while in the United States, the industry is still struggling from a dearth of financing because of the credit crisis and waiting for more action from Washington on federal policies for renewable energy ... For the United States to really play in the cleantech game, more federal money is needed for research, development and demonstration projects, said Google's Weihl, noting $10 billion to $30 billion a year would be a sustainable budget.

But then, we conclude with this:

"I like to say there's no place in the planet that you can get an idea and turn it into money faster than Silicon Valley," said Tom Werner, chief executive of SunPower.

Werner said the model that has evolved is that ideas and great companies come from Silicon Valley but are manufactured elsewhere. "I think that model can thrive," Werner added.

In other words: design the hot new thin-film photovoltaic panel in Palo Alto, but manufacture it in Taiwan. The canonical example of that model would be the semiconductor chip industry. With the significant exception of Intel, the predominant Valley model for decades has been to send nearly all manufacturing overseas. The Valley is dotted with venture-capital-funded chip design start-ups whose business model depends on outsourcing every possible process, including, sometimes, design.

But why exactly would it be in the interest of the federal government to bankroll that particular model? The Obama administration obviously wants to boost American green energy muscle, but it has also made it pretty clear that one of its goals in doing so is to create "green jobs." One reason why Silicon Valley companies are having trouble landing federal loan guarantees or direct grants could be the strings attached to the funding requiring manufacturing to be in the U.S.

That isn't the Silicon Valley way. Sure, the model may indeed continue to thrive, but don't blame the federal government if it doesn't. And consider this: Would China and India be as well positioned to take the lead in new green technologies, if Silicon Valley hadn't opened the door for them?

Except that this Microsoft bid, made at the late date of February 2008, even if it can't be considered a move made out of desperation, is at the very least a move generated by massive frustration. Try as it might, Microsoft cannot gain ground on Google -- the company that currently claims ownership of the soul of Silicon Valley (as in -- we can have fun and make a bazillion dollars). So where once a Microsoft bid for Yahoo would have been seen as presaging the long-awaited total triumph of Gates and Co. over the freewheeling Valley, now all it does is prove that winning every battle it fights is no longer a Microsoft birthright. Microsoft is playing catch-up from further behind than ever. The future requires a major beachhead on the Web. Microsoft, after at least a decade of Herculean effort, still doesn't have one. So it wants to buy the biggest one it can find.

What a comeuppance! Unable to succeed by developing a superior search engine -- even though it owns the desktop -- or better Web advertising technology, Microsoft has been reduced to buying another company that is also forlornly watching Google disappear into the distance ahead.

Steve Ballmer is betting that there are synergies between the two massive companies that will make Microsoft a more effective competitor to Google. "Putting these things together with a great integration should be quite an accelerant to progress," he told the Wall Street Journal.

That seems unlikely. Sure, thousands of companies have disappeared without a trace after being sucked into the Microsoft maw, but digesting Yahoo will be a lot harder than your average Burmese python's attempt to swallow a water buffalo. By the time the kinks are all worked out -- all the layoffs and corporate defections over, all the technological incompatibilities resolved, all the in-house office politics settled -- Google will be well on its way to conquering the next frontier.

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And now, just for historical interest purposes, I present to you the full text of a blurb I wrote about Yahoo for Wired Magazine's "Electric Word" feature way back in June 1995.

Yippee for Yahoo

Ten million hits a week is a lot for any Web site. But that's how many swarm through the Yahoo Internet directory (http://www.yahoo.com/), says Jerry Yang, a Stanford PhD candidate in electrical engineering. Yang and fellow grad student David Filo created the popular directory a year ago. A nifty search engine and comprehensive listings of sites on the Web made Yahoo instantly popular.

The directory didn't really take off until it caught the eye of Netscape exec and Mosaic creator Marc Andreessen. Early this year, Netscape linked its "Net Directory" button to the Yahoo server, increasing the weekly hits by 40 percent, says Yang. Yahoo reached warp speed in April when venture capitalist Sequoia Capital began backing the service. Yang and Filo are taking leaves of absence to work full time on their new company.

But the U.S.-China angle means the dispute immediately carries with it all the tensions inherent in that most fractious of all current global trade relationships. Could this be another case of Asian pirates, supposedly incapable of true innovation, stealing hard-earned proprietary technology from the West? And the high-tech gizmos at issue -- state-of-the-art chip equipment manufacturing machines -- occupy a symbolically potent niche at the top of the semiconductor ecosystem, a niche that has traditionally been dominated by Japan, the U.S. and a few European countries.

Applied Materials is the king of chip equipment manufacturing. Say what you want about Taiwanese and Chinese chip foundries grabbing market share away from the U.S. for the production of semiconductors, but all those foreign companies buy the machines to make their chips from Applied Materials or a tiny handful of other companies.

AMEC is an newcomer to this world -- a Shanghai-based start-up aiming to be the first Chinese member of an exclusive club. AMEC specializes in machines that use plasma etching technology (Etch) and chemical vapor deposition (CVD) to build chips -- a market currently dominated by Applied Materials.

But guess what? AMEC's founders include a couple of ex-Applied Materials employees who just happened to be in charge of Applied's Etch and CVD divisions when they worked for the Santa Clara company. In fact, according to the lawsuit filed by Applied, no less than 30 ex-Applied employees now work for AMEC.

So Applied Materials is hopping mad, or at least pretending to be. In its suit, Applied alleges that Gerald Yin, a former corporate vice president, general manager and chief technology officer at Applied, and Aihua Chen, the general manager of its CVD product group, masterminded a scheme of nefarious behavior including "breach of contract, misappropriation of trade secrets and unfair competition."

Led by Defendants Yin and Chen, AMEC seeded their company with a multitude of former Applied employees ranging from Applied corporate vice presidents to technologists and engineers...

While semiconductor manufacturing tools are very sophisticated and complex machines that typically take years to design and build, AMEC, armed with Applied confidential information and trade secrets, designed, built and announced the availability of its CVD and Etch tools within one year of starting business in China.

The betrayal!

At the time Yin left Applied, he filled out a Notice of Termination form explaining the reason that he had decided to leave Applied. Yin wrote that he had chosen to retire because he would soon be 60 years old and because he had been working for 36 years after obtaining his college degree.

But then, before you could blink an eye, the dastardly renegade had lined up hundreds of millions of dollars of capital and gone into business competing with his former employer. Oh, the perfidy.

AMEC, naturally, swears that everything is on the up-and-up. And while asking the district court judge to dismiss the case, the company's Silicon Valley law firm hasn't been shy about firing broadsides of their own.

Applied is anxious to label its former employees thieves -- but not a single Applied witness has signed his or her name to a sworn document asserting that the named defendants had any access to any particular trade secret, asserting that there is any reason to believe that they misused Applied's confidential information or breached their employment contracts, asserting that the technologies shown in the AMEC patent applications were actually developed at Applied (and were developed before the applicants left Applied's employ), or asserting that there is any particular customer of Applied's that is in imminent danger of being lost to AMEC.

It is impossible to tell from the court documents who is truly in the right, but after reviewing them, the conclusion How the World Works comes to is that the dispute doesn't tell us anything meaningful about differing approaches to technological innovation on the part of the Chinese and Americans. Instead, it offers a case study of Silicon Valley corporate culture -- as it has historically evolved.

A better capsule description of how the game is played in the Valley is hard to imagine. Employees of established companies, armed with a lifetime of know-how and specialized skills, are always abandoning ship to start their own firms, often in direct competition with their former employers. One of the touchstones of Valley lore is the story of the "traitorous eight" -- the eight engineers who split from their infamous boss William Shockley to found Fairchild Semiconductor. Almost every chip company in the Valley today, including, most famously, Intel, can trace its own genealogical heritage back to Fairchild.

Academics eager to explain the Valley's enduring vitality often point to the wide diffusion of intellectual property propelled by wave after wave of start-ups as essential to understanding how the region continues to prosper.

Applied Materials is as familiar with how this works as anyone. Gerald Yin has been in the chip business for a long time. Before joining Applied in 1991, he worked for Applied's main competitor, Lam Research. (And one assumes he might just have brought some knowledge of Lam's trade secrets with him when he came over to Applied.) But before Lam, he worked for Intel. Indeed you can connect the dots all the way from AMEC back to the traitorous eight. By deciding to start up his own company, Yin is just doing what the Valley's DNA dictates, albeit on the other side of the Pacific.

This isn't necessarily a story about cheating. It's a story about how technological knowledge spreads.

The irresistible quote, which ExpressIndia repeated in full, and so must How the World Works, comes from Kailash Joshi, described as "a prominent Indian entrepreneur in Silicon Valley," who "thinks Indians flourish in the United States not just because of their commitment to education, but because their native country prepared them for America's ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity, and its aggressive market economy."

"By that, I mean India has 21 national languages. Every religion in the world lives in India," Joshi said.

"We are very competitive. We come from a very diverse upbringing, so coming to the U.S. is a very easy move. We understand the U.S. like the palm of our hand."

Neither ExpressIndia nor the San Jose Mercury News mentioned how many Indians live in Santa Clara County, but the Merc included a helpful link to the raw Census data, there for anyone with Excel to crunch to their geeky heart's delight.

There are 101,551 Indian immigrants living in the county, as compared to 155,597 Chinese, 382,777 Mexicans and 110,869 Vietnamese. That's 750,794 people out of a total of 1,731,281 residents.

That's some serious diversity.