Tuesday, July 1, 2003

Escaping Microsoft's Dominance. [Google] could be the foundation for a platform, but this company is even less prepared to compete, imho, than Netscape was. [Scripting News] Superficially, this doesn't make any sense. How could Google morph into a platform? After a few instants of reflection, it makes great sense. Dave Winer got it exactly right. The foundation of any information system is an index into data items. Any file system is based on an indexing scheme. Mostly very inconvenient ones — file paths — but Microsoft is trying to fix that for Longhorn (and so is Apple for Panther, which should be here earlier). However, indexing schemes for one's own disk pale into insignificance compared with Google's index. There is no fundamental technical reason why the index cannot go beyond Web pages and other textual documents to a broader range of (semi-structured) objects. The world's public file system. Throw in support for federated indexes and access authentication, and you could have unprecedented integration of public and private information, under distributed control. Google is already my research library. I don't need to bookmark or keep a carefully organized local collection, I just type a few keywords and almost always I find what I am looking for, and often additional relevant material I wasn't expecting. The only thing I'm missing is a way of keeping an easily-manipulable history of my searches. If Google was a platform, a small developer could create the most powerful research support tools ever, just as an example. 7:19:31 PM