the Onda

Fabulous piece by Tim O'Reilly in Radar on why Yahoo deserves to get swallowed by Microsoft. To borrow from Paul Graham, Tim seems to be arguing that Yahoo just never got with the "grain" of the web despite having bought awesome grain assets (Flickr, Delicious). The money quote here:

The other important characteristic of the winners, of course, is that they tap into a data stream that really matters. Owning network effects around consumer photos, for instance, is much less powerful than owning network effects around paid search. So one of the key questions we have to ask ourselves going forward is this: what are the major data subsystems of the future Internet Operating System. Location, identity (and social graph), search (and not just web search but also product search, in which Amazon has a very strong position) come to mind. In a lot of ways, finding the data associated with the old vectors who, what, when, where, and how is a good place to start.

While the jury is still out on whether the "social graph" belongs in this primal set of key types of data that you can build huge businesses around, I completely agree with the others that he lays out. It would be interesting to explore how some of the big Internet trends tend to interesect these different types of data: mobile computing, virtual worlds, custom manufacturing, and emergent online marketplaces just to name four.

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