Poor reporting.
1. Facebook may have a paper worth of several billion dollars, but that's all it is. There is no analyst who is going to say they could raise anywhere near that kind of money in an IPO, and no CEO in their right mind would pay that much cash for them.
2. The iPod wasn't the first mp3 player (as correctly indicated). But that doesn't mean that the utter simplicity of the user interface was perfected when the idea was pitched to Real.
3. There is no reason to believe that a combined HD-DVD/Blu-Ray standard would sell any more discs than they do today. They're simply priced above the price point which consumers are willing to pay.
4. As the article says, who knows what would have happened. Again, price drove the market, not the vendor selection.
5. The Apple Lisa was an utter failure. The success of the Mac had a lot to do with its compact packaging; the user interface was novel but not exactly ideal. The difference between Apple and XEROX was in their sales channels: Apple had established computer vendors through its Apple ][ products. XEROX PARC hadn't commercialized many technologies and didn't have computer sales channels established.
6. Pure speculation. Well, since they don't actually suggest an outcome, it's really just speculating that others can speculate. Solid stuff, there.
7. Both AOL and CompuServe offered a closed model. Both are complete failures. The problem with both of them was that they were trying to offer Internet access (and limited Internet services) without owning any of the last-mile infrastructure. The only successful players in that industry today (think Rogers, Bell, etc) own the wires and phone towers that connect you to the web.
8. The Print Media have a lot of problems today; the existence of CraigsList isn't among their bigger problems. (They do still make a lot of money off of ads. Free newspapers make all their money from ads, and have proliferated in the past few years.)
9. It's not that Search is so big. It's that there's money to be made from paid search (i.e. placing results from paying advertisers) and from placing ads with search results. Search was a big money loser until Google figured out how to save space on the page for ads.
10. If MS hadn't saved Apple, it's quite possible that Jobs would still have seen the promise of the iPod and taken it to other VCs in the valley.
