You don’t take me seriously because I use a flush-left design? Are you serious?

Is it because you don’t prefer flush-left text, or because you think that I don’t know how to center a box?

If it’s the first, tough. It’s my site, and I *do* prefer flush-left text to a centered column. When there are two columns, and one of them is shorter than the other, you end up with one column that is wonkily off-center. Alternatively, you can push it over half the width of the shorter column, but then it appears off-center when both columns are visible. Flush-left solves the problem by not attempting to center the columns at all.

If it’s the second, well, that’s quite easily done:

#wrapper { margin:0 auto; }

And, with all DUE respect, I can’t take you seriously until you learn the difference between do and due.

Re: Implications to Y!
Oh, the restructure isn’t “possible,” it’s very much definite. Jerry Yang has made no secret that he is going to be surveying the various initiatives that the company is involved in, and “doubling down” on those that are worthwhile. To reuse a now-infamous metaphor, he’s scraping the peanut butter off of the unprofitable toast and piling it up where it can make a financial difference. Then the unprofitable toast goes in the trash, or at least back in the cupboard. In other words, pull investment and personnel from the projects that don’t make money and/or further Yahoo’s objectives, and focus them on the projects that do. I know a bunch of engineers who were told that their jobs are going away, and told to choose a new project from a few alternatives. No one’s getting fired, but a lot of people are moving cubes. (I was one of those, actually, and am quite happy with the change!)

It’s widely known that search marketing is really the last stand for advertising online. LRECs and SKYs and NORTHs are worth selling, but compared to sponsored search results, they’re worthless. That’s why Panama was such a big deal. We out-perform Google by a pretty wide margin in every single metric except sponsored search, and that’s why they have a better income/overhead ratio than Yahoo.

A good partnership can pull in a lot more revenue than dumb ads, and benefit the partner’s marketing objectives much more, with less overhead, all while providing a better user experience. I expect that we’ll see more of these kinds of relationships in the future, along with new products that leverage what Yahoo! exclusively holds—namely, access to the largest internet community in the world, and the insights that can be gained from it. And of course, more focus on search marketing and other intelligently targeted advertisement.

Re: Google definition and competitive pimping
I actually don’t think there’s anything wrong with pimping the competition. I freely admit that I use some of Google’s products. Their Search page is conceptually simpler, and my fingers were trained to type it long before I came to work here. Gmail presented a new paradigm for email that is much more to my liking. But, Yahoo! Mail has several orders of magnitude more users than GMail, and likely will for quite some time. In general, Google caters to geeks, and Yahoo caters to the masses. I’m not the masses

I didn’t use the Google define: shortcut because I actually wanted to see the etymology of the word, not just what it meant. I don’t recall what the word was, though.