Google is Living in the Past, Man

By Doug Barney

Lately I’ve been arguing that Yahoo! is not worth the nearly $44 billion Microsoft is offering. That’s because every single Web tool Yahoo! has, MSN has as well. Microsoft is spending the entire GDP of Croatia to buy a declining base of customers.

Nor have I seen any real innovation out of Yahoo! (aside from the clever exclamation point after its name!).

Now Web creator Tim Berners-Lee thinks Google may be in the same backward-thinking boat. Berners-Lee is impressed with Google search, but believes the real future is doing things that have never been done before. For instance, Berners-Lee believes all kinds of information can be linked dynamically: images, sounds, documents. This way everything connects to everything else – over the Web.

This could be of particular interest to engineers who often deal with real and artificially created objects, documents for specs and ideas, and project members. What if these objects could share information, so a change in a document could feed into a spec, or a new element of a design could be added to an invoice or customer letter?

Google may well end up owning this new space. And maybe Yahoo! has some secret plan. But if Microsoft spent that $44 billion on Web research, it could lead to the invention of a lot of hot new Internet tools.

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3532832.ece