"And that's nothing but grim news for the myriad feature-oriented Web startups that were founded mainly to be acquired by Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo. If the Web giants stop buying, a lot of Web 2.0 fruit will die on the vine."

Maybe now startups will actually have a business model that involves becoming profitable rather than simply hoping to get bought by Google.

"(God help you if you're, say, a young server-farm company.)"

Cloud computing anybody?

"we'll have a lot more talented people going into things like real engineering, as opposed to financial engineering."

o snap