There are a lot of indications that the little bump is over.  Is April 31 the bottom of the dollar's fall?  hmmmm...

Bringing this post back around to technology: Finance.Yahoo.com is once again is an example of the ubiquitous presence of productivity improvements given to us FREE by the power of the law of accelerating change.

Back when I was a kid, my dad handled our families investments on his own for a period of time.  This required research and reading and gathering of information.  He subscribed to Value Line which was [is] "...best known for publishing the The Value Line Investment Survey , a stock analysis newsletter that's updated weekly and kept by subscribers in a large black or green binder." [wikipedia link].

I don't know the cost, but I'm sure it wasn't free.  Apart from the fact it cost money it also had other constraints on distribution.

1. Most people had never heard of it.
2. It was mailed weekly, meaning that for any short term decision making the data was out of date before you got it .  Long term planning was of course still valid.
3. Help resources with which to interpret the charts and data were much harder to come by.

Now with finance.yahoo.com (and its competitors) we have all the information available to us that was provided by Value Line and much more.  All the stocks in all the markets evaluated in minute by minute updates (second by second?).  Experts from across the industry providing opinions on the stocks performance.  Forums on how to interpret the data.

And it's free.

Technology with these capabilities in 1985 would have been a differential advantage for an investment firm and protected as one of its chief corporate IP assets.  Now, well its available to everyone.

The flip side of the law of accelerating change is that once a technology improvement becomes ubiquitous, we, being normal humans, accept it and ignore it and absorb it as if it has always been so.

It's free and unremarkable.  That's remarkable.

About the Microsoft offer to buy Yahoo!

Nope.

Not gonna do it.

Go somewhere else to read about it.

...oh ok...since you forced me to.

Damn! but what a bold move!

It is a curious move though, in some regards because in many respects Microsoft and Yahoo have competing platforms: email, search, advertising.  But where the rubber meats the road in Internet superhighway is in the size (and quality) of audience.

Google has been able to charge a premium for its advertising because it has the largest audience.

This merger would put the combined Yahoo - Microsoft search engine market share at a near parity with Google.  Therefore they would be more able to compete in the market place.

It remains to be seen if they can successfully merge the two efforts successfully, not a simple task.