SEBASTOPOL, Calif. -- The Amazon Kindle has sparked huge media interest in e-books and has seemingly jump-started the market. Its instant wireless access to hundreds of thousands of e-books and seamless one-click purchasing process would seem to give it an enormous edge over other dedicated e-book platforms. Yet I have a bold prediction: Unless Amazon embraces open e-book standards like epub, which allow readers to read books on a variety of devices, the Kindle will be gone within two or three years.

To understand why I say that, I'll need to share a bit of history.

In 1994, at an industry conference, I had an exchange with Nathan Myhrvold, then Microsoft's (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) chief technology officer. Myhrvold had just shown a graph that prefigured Chris Anderson's famous "long tail" graph by well over a decade. Here's what I remember him saying: "Very few documents are read by millions of people. Millions of documents--notes to yourself, your spouse, your friends--are read by only a few people. There's an entire space in the middle, though, that will be the basis of a new information economy. That's the space that we are making accessible with the Microsoft Network." (These aren't Myhrvold's exact words but the gist of his remarks as I remember them.)

You see, I'd recently been approached by the folks at the Microsoft Network. They'd identified O'Reilly as an interesting specialty publisher, just the kind of target that they hoped would embrace the Microsoft Network (or MSN, as it came to be called). The offer was simple: Pay Microsoft a $50,000 fee plus a share of any revenue, and in return it would provide this great platform for publishing, with proprietary publishing tools and file formats that would restrict our content to users of the Microsoft platform.

The only problem was we'd already embraced the alternative: We had downloaded free Web server software and published documents using an open standards format. That meant anyone could read them using a free browser.

While MSN had better tools and interfaces than the primitive World Wide Web, it was clear to us that the Web's low barriers to entry would help it to evolve more quickly, would bring in more competition and innovation, and would eventually win the day.

In fact, the year before, we'd launched The Global Network Navigator, or GNN, the world's first Web portal and the first Web site supported by advertising. To jump-start GNN, we hosted and sponsored the further development of the free Viola web browser, as a kind of demonstration project. We weren't a software company, but we wanted to show what was possible.

Sure enough, the Mosaic Web browser was launched shortly thereafter. The Web took off, and MSN, which later abandoned its proprietary architecture, never quite caught up.

For our part, we recognized that the Web was growing faster than we could, particularly as a private company uninterested in outside financing. So we sold GNN to America Online in June 1995. Big mistake. Despite telling us that they wanted to embrace the Web, they kept GNN as an "off brand," continuing to focus on their proprietary AOL platform and allowing Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) to dominate the new online information platform.

Whenever President-elect Obama is asked how he'll pay for his ambitious health care reform plans, he invariably talks about the $80 billion in annual savings he'll get from bringing computerized recordkeeping to doctors' offices and hospitals.

If only that were true. While there are benefits that might be had from using computers more widely in medicine, doing so won't save us any money and, in fact, will likely make things more expensive. There's even a chance that the quality of care might get worse along the way.

That's probably counterintuitive to anyone contemplating the wall of file drawers in a typical doctor's office. Medicine clearly has yet to join the rest of the world in going digital; no wonder, the thought goes, that U.S. health care is so expensive.

But while paper records certainly have their inconveniences--filling out your thousandth questionnaire, say--they play a very minor role in galloping health care inflation.

Instead, the heart of the problem is the U.S. fee-for-service system, in which doctors get paid to do things to people. The more technical and invasive the procedure, the more money they make. Doctors have responded in the expected Pavlovian manner, collectively shifting away from basic primary care toward expensive specializations that run up costs without necessarily improving medical outcomes.

As any chief information officer can tell you, adding computers to this sort of inefficient process only makes the inefficiency happen more quickly.

Much of what doctors or policymakers know about technology comes from vendors, who are busy guilt-tripping the medical sector about being slow to get with it. But more quietly, health care economists have been studying the actual impact of these systems. Their findings should disturb those who look to information technology for an easy fix.

You can say a lot of bad things about Yahoo!. The boys at Google stole the Internet out from under them. Chief Executive Jerry Yang choked when presented with a rich buyout offer from Microsoft. Its psychedelic corporate color scheme--yellow and purple--may cause seizures.

Don't dismiss the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Web portal as worthless, though. Wall Street has self-destructed. The U.S. auto industry's business model makes no sense. Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ), however, remains a cash-spewing machine.

So when corporate raider and Yahoo! board member Carl Icahn doubled down on Yahoo! in a Thanksgiving-week frenzy, after watching his previous investment lose $1 billion since buying 69 million shares of Yahoo! for $25 a share early this year, the question shouldn't be "Is he crazy?" The right question is: Has Icahn lost his nerve?

That's because Yahoo is overdue for a trip to the corporate chop shop. And while All Things Digital's Kara Swisher debunked a report over the weekend in the Times of London that Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) would buy Yahoo!'s search business in a complex $20 billion deal that would place former AOL chief Jon Miller and former President of Fox Interactive Media Ross Levinsohn in charge of Yahoo!, some sort of deal seems inevitable.

That's in large part thanks to Icahn, who manage to scrap his way onto Yahoo!'s board this year and is only growing more aggressive by the day. Icahn spent $67 million for 6.8 million shares of Yahoo! stock in late November, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The move follows last month's announcement that Yahoo! is searching for a successor to Yang and boosts Icahn's stake in Yahoo! to roughly 5.5% of the company.

Who do you think is a leading contender for the Yahoo! CEO job? Check out what the market says (right).

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Yang basically lost his post after losing his nerve. First he dithered when Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer offered $31 a share for Yahoo!, at a time when its shares were going for $19.18 each. Then, after a series of halfhearted negotiations, Yahoo! ditched Microsoft for an ad partnership with Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ). That partnership fell apart as well last month after U.S. antitrust authorities raised legal questions about the deal.

Enter Icahn. Yahoo! is a complex welter of businesses that has long added up to less than the sum of its parts. Last year Sanford Bernstein estimated Yahoo! was worth $54.3 billion, or $38 a share, when you add up Yahoo!'s cash position, stakes in Yahoo! Japan and China's Alibaba, and Yahoo!'s search, subscription and display advertising businesses. While that value has surely fallen, with Yahoo!'s market capitalization now at just $16 billion, chopping up Yahoo! is now a more attractive option than ever.

To top it all off, Yahoo! is still cranking out cash, reporting net income of $54 million on revenues of $1.79 billion for the quarter ending in September. While the figure is well below the $151 million in earnings it reported during the year-ago quarter, that is still pretty sweet compared with anything you'll see out of Detroit.

Making money on Yahoo! stock, however, could take some work. The recession will surely hurt Yahoo!'s earnings. Wall Street's chaos will make it tough to find buyers for chunks of the company, even if Icahn installs a management team willing to chop Yahoo! into bits. Laying off 1,200 full-time employees this month represents a first step. That will lop off more than $100 million in annual expenses in a hurry.

But let's face it, Icahn has a talent for making money on some pretty terrible businesses. He's picked over scruffy companies ranging from airline TWA to American Can. Maybe that's the problem. At Yahoo!, Icahn is sitting on a collection of franchises with a real future. It must be an unfamiliar sensation.