Is it more inflammatory in a headline to say, "death to Google" than "death to AOL" or "death to Yahoo!"? That seems to be what everyone's going with, today.

Because today is the day that everyone's reviewing the keynote speech of longtime cable exec Leo Hindery, at the Convergence 2.0 conference yesterday. Hindery (representing the "Washington Insider" viewpoint but, seemingly, attacking his subject matter in an Infrastructure-is-King Insider kind of way) represented the media universe as consisting of three pillars:

• Content (ABC, NBC, Disney, Time Warner's content side?),
• Portals (Google, Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, and eBay) and
• "Non-Broadcast Distributors" (notably, cable and the satellites)

He put numbers to everything, so I can make fun of it more easily. Portals have a collective market cap of $225 billion, he says. Advertising represents two-thirds of this, or about $150 billion. But as the content that makes up the backbone of these portals is non-proprietary, it will be easy for the content providers to steal that money away.

Hence, death to Google. And three of the other four (I haven't found where he said which of the content providers would survive).

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer can't get no love. His famous "monkey boy" performance is crazy-popular among those who thrive on poking fun at (and re-mixing) Ballmer's sweaty antics. He's being marginalized as Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie are groomed to replace Gates (and, we imagine, Ballmer as well) -- and reporters and analysts are jostling to get past him and talk to Ozzie, who everyone seems to adore.

Now the worst possible judgment, from Business 2.0 Magazine. He just doesn't matter. And what's more: he matters less than anyone in business. Ouch.

In conjunction with the mag's "50 Who Matter Now" list (featuring Ray Ozzie and competitive leaders Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and worst of all for Ballmer's ego, Bill Gates himself), Ballmer headlines the "10 People Who Don't Matter" segment. "Let's face it: The head of the world's biggest software company is a lame duck," the judgment begins.

A lame duck who decides what happens with billions of investors' -- of your -- cash. Somehow, that's not very comforting.

"Gas prices are just going up, up, up, just like Google stock, baby, just like the Google stock," says Om Malik in his podcast with Niall Kennedy. eBay isn't, and in fact it is considering partnering with Microsoft (or maybe that's just a rumor it is putting out there for more bargaining power with Google).

eBay isn't working hard enough to improve the user experience, says Niall, and despite the coolness of Skype and Paypal, the core business - the auction business - is really where it needs to grow if the company is going to continue to increase its earnings.

What does eBay need to do to accomplish that? Simple, Niall and Om tell us, do these five things:

1. Integrate Paypal with the same address system, and with other services like Evite;
2. Develop a shareware application;
3. Have the ability to resell digital media like iTunes (maybe this is what they're thinking about with the Skype deal?);
4. Create a separate eBay 2.0 company that helps facilitate digital assets;
5. Buy Quicken and add it on to the eBay product line.

Of all these I like the ideas about Quicken and the Paypal integration the best. What do you think?