I like this photo comparing AOL, Google and Yahoo. Microsoft is like Yahoo and AOL.
It is an perhaps so obvious that we don’t even notice the beauty and calness of simplicity. I couldn’t stand to have a Yahoo type home page. There are too many things flashing and distracting the eye.
For many of my commercial sites, I have no advertising on my home page. e.g. Economics Help. The reason is that the home page is the page people are most likely to link to. By taking away advertising, you may lose the odd cent, but the increase in links is definitely worth it.