The future is now

Worldview Item of the Day for 1 February 2008

Hearing this morning that Microsoft has made a $44 billion offer to buy Yahoo! reminded me that the news is not always about politics. Instead, sometimes the world is about vaguely conceived concepts of the future suddenly coming into sharp focus.

Some of you may remember a flash film from a few years ago called Epic 2014, wherein the producers envisioned a world where Google has managed to buy and merge every kind of information and media into a single portal to the living of life itself. Whether this dream is utopian or cataclysmic is for the viewer to decide, but it is a poignant tale nonetheless.

Many people are going to be inclined to join the chorus of Microsoft hating over this latest announcement, but I will not be one of them. Frankly, if it had not been for companies like Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and the other ubiquitous names in the personal computer industry like them, the world would be consigned to using Macs in PC monasteries filled with drones in white robes who bid you to take your shoes off before you approach the mighty Apple.

But I digress.

Certainly, I view the continued merger-mania among technology companies around the world with a jaundiced eye. I also view that mania with the historical view of the beginning of the last century when giant companies like General Motors and IBM gobbled up their competitors. It turns out those companies got so big, so unwieldy, that they ceased to be able to effectively compete (GM) or spun apart into a thousand little–and more profitable–companies (IBM).

The point underneath all of this is that we the consumers–I do not mean that term in the pejorative sense but in the sense that we are the ones who determine what we consume—will still have choices, even if Microsoft is “the only game in town”. There will always be a giant slayer, an people tend to like the underdog.

Let’s remember that Yahoo! Was one of those underdogs once too. Then, it was viewed as the inevitable inheritor of all that was information as its influence grew and spread. For a long time, Yahoo! was the search point of choice for millions of internet users around the world. Then came a little company called Google, and Yahoo! was not so cool anymore.

Sure a war is brewing between Microsoft and Google over the “control of the desktop”, but frankly they will not decide who will win. It will be you and me using the technology that fits us best, and I bet that technology will not have Microsoft or Google in the name.

-=DLH=-

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2 Responses to The future is now

  1. chrispy85 says:

    it’s funny that Mac used to be (still is, I guess) the “cool, trendy” individualistic choice over against the stuffy suits of the PC world. At least in the minds of their ad department…

  2. dlhitzeman says:

    That’s true, yet their uber-control over everything “i” means that their products are overpriced, limited in usefulness and applicability, and generally incompatible with everything else on the planet.

    -=DLH=-

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