Search Engines

Scoble posted on MSN's recent improvements. Made me realize that I have both google and msn keyword links in firefox. Using that method I can enter either "g " or "m " in my firefox address bar to do either a google or an msn search. Firefox replaces the G with a link to google and the M with a link to msn search, meaning that there is no effort necessary on my part to switch search engines than to use my right pointer instead of my left pointer... and I'm right handed so you would think that MSN would have the edge.

All that is to say that my vendor lock in to search engine is very low. One letter difference is all it takes for me to switch. That's very good for me. The minute MSN is better than google (it could happen I suppose) I could even remap my G key to search MSN, meaning I wouldn't even have to learn to hit a different letter. What if all of my services were this way? What if I could take all my apps and run them on my powerbook when 10.4 came out because the OS was much better suited to my productivity.

I think Sun is pushing that direction. They are big on open standards vs. open source. I think Sun wants to be the provider. They want to out executed on providing people with the platform, or sell compute cycles like electricity is sold today.

Eh, I thought I was going somewhere interesting with this... maybe I'm not.