It's weird to me that aQuantive is apparently not viewed as a massive failure for MS, even though they paid billions in cash for it and it's now worthless. But

It's weird to me that aQuantive is apparently not viewed as a massive failure for MS, even though they paid billions in cash for it and it's now worthless. But not only that, it was supposed to make them more competitive in a big market and didn't do that at all. So from a lay perspective it seems like that should be a disaster for Ballmer and probably others at MS, but it's being met with an attitude of "yep, that happened, and it doesn't really mean anything".