Silicon Valley is Still the Wild West: and if it Ain't New, Who Cares?

John Markoff's story in today's New York Times about Microsoft's proposal to buy Yahoo, in order to battle Google, shows just how fast things move on the tech frontier.

Microsoft, an ancient company at 32 years, wants to buy aging Yahoo, at 13, to stack up against upstart Google, 10.

Markoff concludes that Google has already won, with which I agree. Google won the day it became a verb and others didn't. And it won again, when it spent a billion on Youtube-- the video service that seems to anyone logical to be little more than a giant copyright suit waiting to happen, another Napster, if you will --and it only got more popular.

(One aside: Is Google still as good as its ubiquity? Are you satisfied with the results when you Google yourself? I'm not. I get listings from years back, and have trouble finding more relevant ones.)

Everyone in this valley is looking for the Next Big Thing and has little patience with last year's model, the story concludes.

Living here is like the wild west, as exciting as it must have been during the Gold Rush, and as open to ingenuity.