Disruptive Times

He seemed destined for obscurity. Filled lamentably as it is by imbeciles, the world was not ready for him

Evian 1998 / Evian 2014

The irony here is that the big portal sites are the ones, increasingly, making it harder to use the Web: They’re under such pressure to turn a profit to justify their market valuations that their pages have become crowded, blinking arrays of commercial distractions. Meanwhile, they’re failing to drive forward the technology at the root of their business. That a couple of grad students could build a better search engine than a whole raft of media and technology companies with stock-market valuations in the billions does not speak well of how these firms are spending their budgets. Which is one more reason to distrust the conventional view that the portals have the future of the Web sewn up. There’s something ultimately dumb about these all-things-to-all-people sites in a medium whose greatest strength is the ability to be specific things to specific people. If the portals can’t even build a better search engine, I am not betting on their ability to control an industry as fast-moving, innovative and metamorphic as the Internet — next year or any year.