• After a high school career of championships and national honors, she was the youngest basketball player in Olympic history to win a medal when the USA women’s team took the silver in Montreal – when she was just 18 years old.
• She led her college team at Old Dominion University to three consecutive major championships: first the WNIT championship, followed the next two years by the AIAW championships – and she personally racked up prestigious national awards and recognitions.
• As a pro player, she led her team to the WABA championship, and was also the scoring leader and the league MVP.
• She has been inducted into the Nassau County Sports Hall of Fame, the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame, the Basketball Hall of Fame, and the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame.
• She was head coach of the WNBA’s Detroit Shock for three years.
• She is currently a full-time basketball analyst for ESPN.
• She just turned 50 years old.

Yes, this is a bit of a stunt. It raises some interest, grabs some headlines, and deflects attention from the ugly on-court fight and its fallout. But the fact is that the Shock need some good short-term help immediately, with their star out for the season.

I still remember excitedly watching Nancy and Old Dominion in those amazing championship seasons of 1979 and 1980. The team went 72-2 at that time. Few sporting events have been that exciting. There is no overstating OD’s dominance, or the personal dominance by Nancy herself.

If anyone can step back into the big leagues at age 50 and make a positive impact every minute she’s on the floor, it’s Nancy-freakin-Lieberman.

For search, I primarily use Google, like most people, and occasionally use Yahoo! search, either by accident or because I want a different perspective. I never use Microsoft for web search, because the results usually don’t get me where I want to go. It doesn’t matter.

When Microsoft announced its unsolicited bid for Yahoo!, my first reaction was dread. Such a merger of giants very rarely works, rarely delivers the promised shareholder value (disclosure: I do not own shares of any of them), and rarely benefits consumers. This isn’t just my observation – there’s a lot of factual support to be found via places like Tom Peters and Oligopoly Watch.

I have been contemplating for some time moving all my email to Google, and therefore changing contact and login information for some 300 sites where I currently use my Yahoo! info. A successful bid from Microsoft to buy Yahoo! would have hastened that decision and migration. Now that Microsoft has walked away from the bid, I am leaning more toward bailing out anyway, but at a more leisurely pace.

When the bid was first revealed, I read so much speculation on the web about the probability of the acquisition going through and about whether that was a good or bad thing for either company. By March, nearly everything I read from industry insiders all over the web was that the acquisition was inevitable, that Yahoo! would be forced to succumb, that Microsoft really badly needed Yahoo! and their search advertising business, etc. Now that the news is out that no deal will be made, the rampant majority opinion seems to be that Yahoo! is now doomed, walking away was the smartest thing Microsoft could do, etc. I hope that Yahoo! can fix their problems and that Microsoft can deliver on their promise to compete and innovate because I want to see all three – Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! – remain healthy and strong and competitive, each in their own way. Fight it out in the open market. I think that’s good for business and good for consumers.