First of all congrats to Jason Steinhorn on his hard work and foresight (two of the most important ingredients of success) at Tellme.

I remember Tellme from the dot com days as one of those companies with insatiable desire and ability to raise money. In many ways it had more hype than substance in the intial stages (anyone remember the “voice web”?) but unlike most of its brethens, it slowly executed towards its vision (while the positioning has changed to reflect the latest buzz words, it has stayed surprisingly faithful to its original vision). Can’t say that about too many companies of that era . . . many of which eventually lost its way amongst all that cash.

Anyways, this is a big win for MSFT. (stock was up big today!). Instead of fighting Google at its own game, algorithmic web search, there are entirely new battlefields being born that are more wide open. . . voice, local, text, j2me and their intersections . . . mixing multiple input and output channels are what really made Tellme cool . . . smart buy for the guys up north . . .

(BTW, I hope eBay took a hard look at this deal . . . search is way too important to leave to the usual players)