When pg writes "Microsoft is dead" (and the outroar over that from MS apologists sounded a lot like your comment, angry capital letters and all) or "Yahoo is in a death spiral", he's talking about potential for growth, not necessarily short term feasibility as a profitable business. Yahoo is irrelevant to the Valley because by and large their stuff is old hat used by middle aged soccer moms in Nebraska. Lots of companies make lots of money off of middle aged soccer moms in Nebraska, but it's not a growth market, especially if the middle aged soccer moms all start joining Facebook and playing bingo there instead of Yahoo.