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Microsoft's Ballmer Kills Print

Ballmer's vision of the printed word only reflects the mindset of someone deluded enough to want to buy Yahoo.....(Yahoo is a backwards-thinking corporate mess only concerned with bonuses and corporat peck order squabbling, as anyone knowing anyone who has worked there is totally aware)...
sure there will be a fallout in the printed world.....and I suspect there will be a lot more pictures and fewer words as digital cameras make pictures cheaper and decline in education and demand for anything more than sound bite makes serious journalism scarcer....even now, photography has been (with few exceptions)turning into the sorting of stochastic images as opposed to the clarity and thoughtful selectivity demanded by the slower and far more expensive constraints imposed by the halide image as practiced by Eisenstadt, Cartier-Bresson, David Douglas Duncan, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and their generation and forbears..although the net is a truly wonderful development in the advancement of communication and information distribution, it has not really found a replacement for the photojournalism lost with LIFE magazine, and is not inherently capable of doing so...fundamentally the intrinsic characteristics of what might be termed spirit and soul of the net is not of the same cloth as of the printed word.....
It is a tragic loss to print that newspapers no longer can (or have not yet learned to) generate the resources absolutely necessary to support the extensive research staff needed to produce thought provoking reflective journalism..at some point, hopefully as soon as possible, there be a backlash to mass shallowness, (don't hold your breath quite yet) and there will be a stable niche for thoughtful printed word....
The same phemomenon as newspapers are experiencing has already happened in the world of science--two generations ago primary scientific literature consisted of books by a single author (possibly with one or two close collaborators) who really understood, and could explain with absolute command and clarity, the overall broad aspects of his field .....the scientific "book" has now devolved almost exclusively into sound bite compilations of proliferating publish-or-perish symposia...meaningfuln... has largely fallen prey to "news"..it is bit hard to envision a Newton writing "Principia", or Laplace writing "la Mecanique Celeste" in this day and age......