Assuming I haven't utterly messed up in creating this cartogram, the following figure shows startups per capita by state around the U.S. in 2007. My source for the data is the excellent new report on the subject from my friends at the Kauffman Foundation.

Tools for creating such cartograms are grim. I was forced to compile some C code. Tooks years off my life. Ended up using Mapresso, which wasn't bad, but is the opposite of self-documenting (maybe self-obfuscating?).

There are major cross-currents on the Microsoft/yahoo deal after this week's earnings news from the two companies. What we discovered, in effect, was that what we have here are two drunks holding each other up.

Why? Because both companies' businesses are squishy and doing somewhat worse than expected. Yahoo wasn't able to pull out a big beat, and Microsoft wasn't able to deliver the quarter expected, largely because of Windows weakness (which I think is a bigger issue than Windows piracy). Even if this would be a horrifically messy combination to bring off, the two companies need each other.

So, here are the options:

• Microsoft walks away, for now or permanently
• Microsoft ups its offer in next 72 hours
• Microsoft "goes hostile " (feel free to say "ooooh")
• Yahoo announces a deal with someone else

Granted, some of these are overlapping, as Yahoo could still announce a deal with someone else while Microsoft ups it offer and/or goes hostile. Nevertheless, you get the gist.

What do I think happens? Tough call, but I think Microsoft wants to walks away, hoping to come back with an offer at a lower price after the bottom falls out of Yahoo's shares again. I just don't buy that Microsoft walks away permanently, or that walking away now would be anything other than a transparent stratagem. They have had every opportunity to negotiate a higher price, and Yahoo has demonstrated no willingness to countenance once, which has made Microsoft highly reluctant to float one unilaterally and negotiate with itself.

Nasty situation. And, more broadly, a business travesty, with both Yahoo and Microsoft squandering business franchises.

I was checking out the schedule for next week's sure-to-be interesting RIMS (Risk & Insurance Management Society) conference in San Diego, and I was stopped cold by the following front-page image:

Do we really want our risk managers to be "gung-ho"? Isn't that at least an oxymoron, if not actively self-refuting?

FOLLOWERS: Hail Messiah!
BRIAN: I'm not the Messiah! Will you please listen? I am not the Messiah, do you understand?! Honestly!
GIRL: Only the true Messiah denies His divinity.
BRIAN: What?! Well, what sort of chance does that give me? All right! I am the Messiah!
FOLLOWERS: He is! He is the Messiah!
BRIAN: Now, fuck off!
      -- from Monty Python's Life of Brian

Last night on Microsoft's conference call the company that Bill built went out of its way to blame Windows Vista sales weakness on piracy troubles in some of Microsoft's fastest growing markets. You know, the "those damn foreigners" excuse.

And the NY Times isn't buying it. The paper's Bits blogger Bob (okay, Steve Lohr -- I made up the Bob part for alliterative power) thinks MSFT is actually seeing weak Vista sales, full stop. No foreigners required. His evidence? One, because people buy less stuff during recessions; and two, because Microsoft would deny it if it were true. Shades of Monty Python's Holy Grail.

You know, I'm as much of a Vista hater as the next Microsoft basher, and Lohr may be right, but even I'll concede this is a fairly thin reed on which to hang an anti-MSFT case. While there is no doubt Vista isn't doing as well as anyone expected, it is tricky stuff indeed to argue the case from the fact that Microsoft is denying there is more Vista weakness than investors already know about.

A nice graph of the heretofor unexamined relationship between drinking Starbucks lattes and and being an Obama supporter:

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