How do you think Yahoo's purchase of Konfabulator fits into all this?

What is Konfabulator but a collection of pretty, arbitrarily arranged, variously functional/non-functional, pieces of information which may (or may not) be driven from the web? There's stock quotes too.

I think Yahoo might get the very problem with portals here. People don't NEED that one stop view of everything. That's too much to cram into a single page. Rather than try to portalize people and draw them to your everything-to-everyone page, attack their desktop and make that the end point of information provided by your services. If they need more detail, they can always click and end up at your finances/weather/news/search page.

It's worked before. Look at the huge adoption of the Google toolbar or the very amibitious MSN toolbar suite. Having Google at the top of my browser window pulls them more page hits than any Google homepage is ever going to.