Two big events happened last week, The San Francisco Chronicle announced cutting 25% of their newsroom staff (as well as several managers) and Microsoft announced their $6B (yes, that is a “B”) acquisition of Aquantive.

During the late 80’s/early 90’s while working for a company called, believe or not, “Multimedia, Inc.” (they owned several newspapers, tv stations, cable systems and tv programming), I spent a lot of time doing my best Elmer Gantry impression exclaiming, “The Internet is coming, the Internet is coming” – the newspaper industry, for the most part, sat on their hands.

Microsoft is good at playing catch up, but $6 billion for Aquantive? Google’s pioneering ship has sailed and when you look at a pie chart of Google’s overwhelming search/advertising market share it looks a lot like a Pac Man icon closing it’s mouth and winning the game.

Decent synopsis of online reading versus offline reading – see if you can guess who said it:

“So reading is going to go completely online. We believe that as we get the smaller form factor, the screen has gotten good enough. Why is reading online better? It’s up to date, you can navigate, you can follow links. The ads in the online reading are completely targeted as opposed to just being a run of prints where many of the readers will find it completely irrelevant. The ads can be in new and richer formats.

In fact, the only drawback of the digital form are the things associated with the device, how big is it, heavy is it, how many hours of power does it have, how much do I have to spend to buy it? But those are things that once you achieve that threshold in terms of the convenience and the cost, then you see a dramatic change in behavior.

Today for people who read newspapers and magazines, even the most avid PC user probably still does quite a bit of reading on print, but as the device moves down in size and simplicity, that will change, and so somewhere in the next five-year period we’ll hit that transition point, and things will be even more dramatic than they are today.”

There are improvements to be made for online reading – I currently have four Firefox windows open and 32 tabs open as I am in heavy research mode – but I do almost all of my reading online. The quote came from Bill Gates and was delivered at the Microsoft’s Strategic Summit – this sounds like something Gates could have said years ago – he said it yesterday.