I knew that I would be ruffling a few feathers with Thursday’s 5 Stocks That Will Never Be Great Again column. I took a look at five companies with passionate investors. Starbucks. General Electric. Microsoft. Blockbuster. Dell. Then I explained why the companies will have to settle for simply being good — but no longer great — in the future. This doesn’t mean that they will be terrible investments. Good is, by definition, good enough. However, when investors expect greatness, they always have to stay on top of their investments, because there is always someone waiting with a new mousetrap to unload.

The long-rumoured deal of Microsoft snapping up Yahoo! finally materialized. Well, at least according to Microsoft. The software titan made a cash and stock offer for Yahoo!. Now it’s up to Yahoo! to decide. Together, they will still only command less than half of the search market that Google watches over. It’s a necessary move, and I explain why in Microsoft or Bust for Yahoo!.

Get it? Taking the w-e-d-g-e out of knowledge? Okay, forget about me. Let’s talk Google. The company introduced Knol on a couple of days ago, it’s own shot at killing Wikipedia with a financially-motivated content-creating reference site. This can be great. This can be garbage. This will definitely be Google. Read my take here in Google’s Grassy Knol Theory.

I was critical of Amazon’s new reader — the Kindle — when it launched last week. I called it a $399 paperweight. However, now that Amazon has opened up its Digital Text Platform, opening the floodgates for anyone to sell text content through Kindle, I have had a change of heart. I even published a tongue-in-cheek Why the Kindle Will Fail piece, exclusively sold through Amazon’s Kindle store to show how easy it is to turn the Kindle into a cottage industry creator. Sure, it’s still early. I sold three digital copies in a day and that was enough to catapult it to #307 on the best-seller list of more than 90,000 titles. Give it time, though. In the meantime, read up on Why Kindle Will Change the World to find out how you can get published.

Well, Overstock had a blowout quarter this morning. The top line may not blow you away but the company managed to grow while dramatically driving down costs. It’s the first non-holiday quarter in which the company posts positive EBITDA, setting the stage nicely for a strong Q4 here.

Anyway, since I had knocked Byrne in the past, I figured I’d give him credit for what appears to be a turnaround. Comparing his renaissance to the rebirth that Randy Moss is experiencing in New England this season seemed like a fair comparison on several different levels. Check it out and you decide.