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Mercury News: At Home warns it may run out of cash. At Home’s financial problems stem, in part, from the collapse of online advertising, which has battered its online media properties. The company has been trying since April to sell its media division, which includes the Excite portal and the BlueMountain online card site.

This isn’t good news by anyone’s standard. At Home has built a superb backbone infrastructure. Its biggest problem may have been the alliance with cable companies, which are the paradigms of lousy customer service.

Even if At Home does go under, however, it shouldn’t be the end of speedier Internet access for its customers. I can’t imagine that the cable TV companies will allow that.

But the trend remains ominous. We seem to be getting further from ubiquitous high bandwidth, not closer. The failure of telecommunications deregulation isn’t the major culprit in this case, but until the nation addresses it we won’t have much prospect for genuine progress.

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Meanwhile, back in the unreal world of Silicon Valley, we learned yesterday that AOL Time Warner was laying off 1,700 people including a batch in a joint venture with Sun Microsystems. Bad news for the folks losing jobs, but the fact that most of the layoffs are taking place in the online part of the company is another reminder that the wrong company may have been the acquirer in this deal.

More in my Wednesday column.

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Craig Burton asks if I used the Be OS or bought a copy. Yes to both (bought a copy at Fry’s a couple of years ago), though I haven’t used it in a while even though I loved its good points. I’ve also bought copies of Red Hat Linux, Mandrake and FreeBSD, because I believe in supporting independent software companies.

For a while I was hoping the music software companies, such as Steinberg, would port their stuff to Be. They didn’t, but the Be OS would have been a fine music-making system. There just weren’t enough apps, for music or anything else.

Gassee did screw up in some ways. He also was in a market trying to develop and sell a commercial product against a monopolist that made certain that OEMs loaded one OS on their computers.

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Silicon Valley is in an economic funk. People are getting as depressed as they were manic during the inflation of the Internet bubble. Both responses are wrong.

Lately I’ve been talking with folks about what they’re doing now. And I don’t see any lack of creativity or any fewer good ideas than before. It’s harder raising money, but that’s part of economic life.

More in my Sunday column.

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Robert Scoble is back, and he’s been missed.

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Two days, no blog. That’s not a record, but it’s unusual.

I’m preparing for a long trip that’ll take me to Australia and Africa, and the weekend was mostly about getting somewhat prepared. A blog is a hungry beast, but sometimes I just can’t feed it.

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WSJ: Industry Standard to shut down. “They don’t drink the Kool-Aid over there,” one banker said, meaning that reporters and editors hadn’t bought into the excesses of the dot-com mania.

Two milestones in a day. Be and now the Standard.

I have few “must-read” magazines on my list anymore, but the Industry Standard has been one. During its heyday I could’t begin to read it all, but I did find it a reliable source of information about an economy I didn’t fully understand.

I’ll miss it.

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So, the little operating system company ultimately couldn

Mercury News: Appeals court refuses to delay case against Microsoft. “Microsoft is getting closer to its day of reckoning in the District Court,” said Jeffrey Blattner, a former senior antitrust official at the Justice Department who worked on the case under Joel Klein.

So, Microsoft has finally run out of time in one arena. The appeals court didn’t buy the company’s routine the first time, and again it unanimously rebuffed yet another attempt to circumvent the law.

Getting this case back in front of a district judge is essential, so that government prosecutors can show just how quickly MIcrosoft is moving to reinforce its monopoly powers and extend them into new markets. Remedies for past lawbreaking should consider the current situation, though no doubt Microsoft will do its utmost to keep the discussion to behavior that can no longer be remedied or for which remedies today would be meaningless in the current context.

Anyone want to bet on how quickly Microsoft annoys the next judge into saying something intemperate? It’s getting to be a pattern. Judges should resist the bait. But maybe the company’s defenders should ask why Microsoft manages to infuriate every judge it encounters, not just moan about the unfairness of judges’ predicatably nasty responses to the provocations.

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