What’s really important about Google

In the end, it isn’t the search engine — important though that is. The real significance of Google is that its techies have built the most powerful computing cluster ever created, and this will in due course enable the company to provide web services that nobody else can match. So what investors will be buying into is not just revenue streams from search-related advertising (lucrative though those may be), but the strategic potential of technology that nobody else — not even the DoD — possesses.

Big Music gets it wrong — again!

Sony, which is normally very good at creating attractive consumer products, has launched its own online music store. And guess what? It’s a turkey — obsessed with control-freakery, using a proprietary format that only plays on Sony hardware, etc. See the Washington Post review. In a nutshell: “This service is an embarrassment to the company that gave the world the Walkman.”