This is the kind of fairytale analysis that gives blogging a bad name. First, not every startup would be willing to sell at their current valuation. Facebook wasn't willing to sell to yahoo for 3 billion last year. Most VCs and a lot of founders are quite willing to decline immediate gratification for the promise of a much larger return in the future.
Second, its not like you can just place an order for every startup in existence on Amazon. There would be significant acquisition costs and the overhead on buying 44 billion worth of startups would run into billions itself.
Third, the previous issues pale in comparison with the problem of what to do with all the startups once you've bought them. Do you let them continue running independently? Do you integrate them all into Microsoft? Do pick and choose and do both? In any case, they'll need large amounts of funding which previously the market would have provided. How do you manage all of them together to get the optimal outcome that again the market would have provided? Its not clear to me that Microsoft, or any other company, could feasibly do all this. The likely scenario is that Microsoft would be paralyzed and go bankrupt, or most of the startups would be neglected into oblivion.<p>What the article is really talking about is replacing a distributed market with a centralized system. It is well known that this is grossly inefficient.<p>The real lesson here is the incredible efficiency of markets. In this case a market can use only 44 billion to create something that a centralized system wouldn't be able to replicate for even a trillion dollars (warning: this number pulled out of a hat to make a point).