I must have Microsoft / Yahoo / Google on my mind this morning. Micah Baldwin has written a delicious scorpion / frog parable about M/Y/G. Until four minutes ago, I thought The Scorpion and the Frog was an Aesop fable, but now due to the beautifulness and truthfulness of all things wikipedia, I now know that it’s the basis of the plot for the Star Trek: Voyager: Scorpion. You – dear reader – might remember it from Natural Born Killers or The Crying Game.

I’ve been chewing on what to say about the Microsoft / Yahoo merger and its impact on entrepreneurship and – more specifically – Silicon Valley entrepreneurship. I was finally gearing up to splat out some of my thoughts on paper, but after reading Marc Andreessen’s brilliant post titled Silicon Valley after a Microsoft / Yahoo merger: a contrarian view, I don’t have to. While I don’t agree with 100% of the things Marc says, he covers all the ground I would have an just saved me 30 minutes of writing.

Zimbra just released v5.0. For those of you that don’t know Zimbra, it’s a Microsoft Exchange / Outlook competitor that Yahoo bought last year for $350m. While v5.0 looks nifty, I was thinking about the release notice to Zimbra customers for Zimbra v6.0, which I assume will be released after Microsoft completes their conquest acquisition of Yahoo (for those of you that live under a rock in a cave, Microsoft made an offer to acquire Yahoo last Friday for $45b.)

One of the great things about startups is that you get to “start from scratch” and create whatever culture you want. You don’t get handed a 275 page how to act like a BigCo employee manual on your first day of work immediately prior to your two week orientation at a conference center in Iowa City. My friends at Lijit have a great sense of humor which is driven top down by the CEO Todd Vernon. I was inspired to post this after waking up to my twitters and seeing that Ari Newman had twittered that Lijit wins for best maint. page.

There is a magic spot on Highway 36 between Boulder and Louisville where 99.4% of all cell phone calls drop. While on a call tonight, the person I was talking to went through this magic spot. Our call dropped. I called him back 30 seconds later. We continued our call after having a chuckle about the inevitability of a dropped cell phone call at that particular spot on 36. My friend suggested that it is further evidence of the unique cosmic forces around here. We are found of saying that Boulder is 25 square miles surrounded by reality. We concluded that there is a wormhole on 36 that one goes through during the transition from Louisville to Boulder. This is the only explanation that we could come up for the reason that the mega-amazing-cell-phone companies can’t figure out how to do a handoff from one cell to the next at this particular spot in the universe.

I have been a hardcore Outlook user for a long time. I grimaced with empathy as I read through Stan James 67 Reasons That Outlook Sucks. If you are having a frustrating Outlook day, Stan’s rant will make you feel better.

Brilliant strategic move by Microsoft today – offering a price for Yahoo that is both well above the market clearing price and done out in the open. Microsoft’s Letter to Yahoo is great. It coincides with Terry Semel leaving the Yahoo board, which is a small irony. In other news, Microsoft is now the rumored buyer of the 432-acre Sun (Storagetek) campus just outside of Boulder. And apparently the bloom is finally coming off of the Google rose.

I got the following note from a friend at a big software company that was founded in the mid-1990’s. Having worked at the big companies it has always amazed me the energy that goes into creating the stack of patents. We have lawyers who we sit down with to go over new products and releases and they generate 10s or 100s of patent filings out of which a few actual patents will end up being granted in a few years. I have around 40 patents for what I would consider innovative work but 99% of them are just for the things anyone would have to do in order to solve the actual problem.

I get questions like the following on a regular basis: “I like reading your blog, and I’m amazed that you can get involved with so many things simultaneously and manage to get great results while living a balanced life. Could you talk a little about your time management techniques, and how do you prioritize your daily activities? I’m sure many readers would appreciate a post on these.” I sat down to write a long answer to this and realized that there is a whole category of self help books on this that takes up a ridiculous amount of floor space at Borders. I decided that rather than answer this in a blog post, I’d write another crappy time management book.