In these days we are reading news about Gates goodbye to Microsoft and new hopes for  new CEO Steve Ballmer : to resist in competition with Google in the web 2.0 era ; But Microsoft seems it’is fighting against this new era, going on with the old-style business that allowed them to be the best of some years ago.

But now times are changed, the proprietary-software lives a pure devaluation era: Open Source done some work, Google done the rest; the point of balance in the free-service jungle restricts competitors in a battle to provide something that is really useful to the end-user, and nowadays it’s not easy.

New corporations and young students created a new market: Google, yahoo, Linden Labs, mySpace, YouTube and the the old’n'rich corporates now have to adapt. So some companies like Adobe launched Photoshop Express, other like Microsoft tried to resolve new problems with old methods: Windows Live Spaces .

It’s strange how Microsoft seems to keep high prices for Office package while OpenOffice.org is offering for free the same product with a similar quality, and it’s much stranger now that Google launched Docs: a word processing, spreadsheet and presentation platform, allowing real-time collaboration on the same document, so  the acquisition of Yahoo cannot be a solution.