In a letter to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer confirmed that Microsoft was willing to offer $33 a share, but that Yahoo was holding out for at least $37 a share, or $5 billion more than Microsoft was prepared to spend. In the letter, Ballmer also says he is ruling out a direct offer to shareholders.

I don’t know if he spends much time thinking about the stuff that ends up getting junked, but having done more than my share of remodeling projects (which included way more trips to the dump than I care to remember) it’s something that’s crossed my mind a few times. Turns out that used carpet is something that’s crossed a few other minds as well; there is a national organization dedicated to keeping old carpet out of landfills — Carpet America Recovery Effort (or CARE).

Right now, carpet recycling is still a very young industry and not very widespread (see map for states that have carpet recyclers.) Like electronics, recycling carpet will cost you… Between 5 and 25 cents per pound in most cases. This is because, like electronics, carpet is a system of several components, and it takes considerable effort to separate those components and put them back into use. Someday it might be economically possible to do it for free, but not just yet.

Some of the things that are made from the recycled carpet include carpet padding, wall covering, landscape materials, plastic pipe products… Anything would be a much better fate for my old carpet than rotting in a landfill for a couple of centuries.

Plaxo, an early social networking site that helps people keep their address books updated, is up for auction, people briefed on the offering said Wednesday night. The company, which has not made a profit, is seeking as much as $100 million, these people said.

It’s never made a profit, it sucks on top of that, and most people hate it. Yet they have the cohones to ask for $100 million. Why is that? Oh yeah, because they have the contact information of millions of people to barter with. Nice.

[…] the Nasdaq Listing Qualifications Panel has determined to delist [SCO’s] securities from the Nasdaq Stock Market and will suspend trading of the securities effective at the open of business on Thursday, December 27, 2007.

The job came with a good salary, and good perks.

But, 26-year-old Vaibhav Vats will tell you, it was doing him no good. His weight had grown to 265 pounds and he was missing out on social life as he worked long overnight hours at a call center. Eventually, he quit.

With the good, comes the bad, I suppose.

[…] lately, success hasn’t come easily for Vivid and its upmarket rivals. Three years ago, 80 percent of Vivid’s income came from DVD sales. Today, Hirsch puts that number at about 30 percent, with the rest coming from a fragmented range of sources: subscriptions to Vivid.com, pay-per-view TV, internet video-on-demand, merchandising, and mobile-phone deals. Domestic DVD sales are down 35 percent this year alone. His revenue is flat, he says, but that’s mainly because he’s been cutting costs. Within five years, he claims, DVD sales will be close to zero.

US Bankruptcy Court Judge Kevin Gross has granted Novell’s motion to lift SCO’s bankruptcy stay so that Novell can continue with its lawsuit, through which the company aims to recover licensing royalties owed to it by SCO. The lawsuit will proceed in a Utah district court under Judge Dale A. Kimball, who ruled in August that Novell—and not SCO—is the rightful owner of the UNIX copyrights, and that Novell is entitled to 95 percent of the licensing revenue SCO collected on the SVRX UNIX copyrights.

I went south on the 101, but that was boring. I was looking for something a little more scenic on the way back, so I drove up 280, which was a gorgeous drive through forested hills. It was just beautiful.

I also have a weird hobby — I like to visit famous college campuses. I don’t know why, I just like to drive around to see what they look like. I was in Boston last year, and I went to visit Harvard — it was amazing.

So, I was quite pleased to see signs for Stanford as I came up 280 through Palo Alto. I succumbed to my little addiction, and took the exit. I drove through Stanford for about five minutes, which was very cool. Now I know what it looks like from the ground, so episodes of Chuck make much more sense now.

In the end, this was a long way of explaining how I came to be sitting in my rental car on Sand Hill Road.

Sand Hill Road is ground zero for venture capital. Anybody who is anybody in the VC world exists on Sand Hill Road. It’s become a synonym all its own — “I don’t know how your pitch is going to play on Sand Hill Road…”

The genesis of this VC mecca appears to have been Stanford itself.

It has been said that the venture capital industry was born in the mid-1960s at San Francisco’s University Club, where young, wealthy Stanford and Ivy league graduates would meet to entertain investment proposals from aspiring entrepreneurs.

It’s to the point where the only thing that matters to many new VC funds is the address on the letterhead.

“People want to retain that Sand Hill address no matter what, so we have a lot of tenants that have several offices in multiple spots within the complex,” Wimmer said. “If you were to poll the tenants to find out whether they care more about the physical need to be here or the letterhead, I don’t know what they would say.”

People will apparently rent a broom closet in order to use the address.

So, there I was in my rented Jeep Commander driving down Sand Hill Road, trying to find all these VC firms. I got to the east end, and it dead-ended into the Stanford Shopping Center.

So I turned around and went west, toward the ocean, still looking for this hive of VC firms. I found a couple, but not much, and then I got back to the on-ramp for 280.

I was a little depressed.

But, there was this little turnoff, just before the exit to 280. Against my better judgment, I drove down this little out-of-the-way road. It was narrow, with no sidewalks. It went up over a ridge, then down a little hill, then…there I was.

Sand Hill Circle is what I was looking for, it turns out. Here is the satellite view from Google Maps. There’s a hidden office complex in this circle, and the directory is absolutely filled with nothing but VC, in every size, shape, and permutation.

• Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers
• Institutional Venture Partners
• Sequoia Capital
• Trinity Ventures
• Menlo Ventures
• Etc.

I would venture a guess that there’s not one non-VC company in the complex.

I drove around for a while because — I’m slightly embarrassed to admit — I was looking for some cool cars. All these folks got crazy-rich off the dot-com boom, so I figured there had to be one Ferrari among the couple hundred cars in the parking lots in and around the office building.

Sadly, no Ferraris. Lots of Mercedes, a couple Porsches, and a Maserati that was being washed in its parking spot by a mobile detailing service. I was a little disappointed.

So, that was my little adventure into the world of VC. I didn’t run in and try to make a pitch, but I at least stood in the center of that universe and soaked up the ambiance.

I hope it made me a better person, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it just made me more of a geek. I mean, seriously — the highlight of my trip to San Francisco? I visited an office complex in Menlo Park.

The only thing worse is if I were to actually blog about it. Oh, wait…

The recovering politician, environmental activist, and Nobel laureate is adding another title to his résumé: venture capitalist. After “a conversation that’s gone on for a year and a half,” according to Gore, he has decided to join his old pal John Doerr as an active, hands-on partner at Kleiner Perkins, Silicon Valley’s preeminent venture firm.

The connection is that KPCB is going to invest one of their funds in “clean tech,” which is, of course, Al’s favorite subject.

Bonnie Brown was fresh from a nasty divorce in 1999, living with her sister and uncertain of her future. On a lark, she answered an ad for an in-house masseuse at Google, then a Silicon Valley start-up with 40 employees. She was offered the part-time job, which started out at $450 a week but included a pile of Google stock options that she figured might never be worth a penny.

After five years of kneading engineers’ backs, Brown retired, cashing in most of her stock options, which were worth millions of dollars. To her delight, the shares she held onto have continued to balloon in value.

[…] the relationship had run its course. NBC got buzz for a revived Saturday Night Live and The Office, and YouTube, through the sheen of legitimacy NBC gave it, got a $1.65 billion buyout. With NBC set to launch its own video site, the laughably named Hulu, the pulling of the YouTube plug was just a matter of time.

Hulu? Why re-invent the wheel? Good job, NBC, for bagging something that works. Good to know you’re not just stupid when it comes to iTunes, but that your stupidity spreads far and wide.

Morons.

The pay in IT is good compared to many other professions, but since they pay you well, they often think they own you

[…] You will go from goat to hero and back again multiple times within any given day

[…] You’ll spend far more time babysitting old technologies than implementing new ones

Broadcast.com’s 1998 IPO was a smash. The stock was priced at $18 a share, but it climbed to $62 at the end of the first day. Cuban and Wagner spent the afternoon at a Wall Street bar, drinking shots every time Lou Dobbs mentioned the company’s name on CNN.

“That was a lot of shots,” Cuban happily remembers. “We were toasted.” He was also $85 million richer.

Now India is outsourcing outsourcing.

One of the constants of the global economy has been companies moving tasks — and jobs — to India, where they could be done at lower cost. But rising wages for programmers here, a strengthening currency and companies’ need for workers in their clients’ time zones or for workers who speak languages other than English are challenging that model.

Now, I hate to say “I told you so” but if you look back a few months, here’s what I said about outsourcing.

The bottom line is this: there is no free lunch. If you find a part of the world that will do work cheap, there is a time limit on that advantage. They’re likely only willing to work cheap because their standard of living is lower than the options (e.g. — the United States).

But once you start pumping work into a situation like that, the standard of living and economic status that allowed you to do that will improve, and people will start acting very much like the alternative you were trying to avoid (e.g. — the United States).

Service provider SCO Group ended a major phase in the history of both UNIX and Linux today by declaring chapter 11 bankruptcy, forcing the company to reorganize before it can resume normal business.