Let's just take a look at recent events in the corporate world of the internet, mobile phones and social media, what I refer it to as corporate twisty-turny things of murky value.
This time it's not the Chinese government but the unruly Microsoft, which is being accused by the mighty Google of being the "invisible hand" behind the European Commission's (EC) preliminary anti-trust inquiry into its practices.
On this subject, Microsoft Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner remarked, "This is the way that competition law agencies function: They look to competitors [and] the practices of dominant firms and the competitive significance of those practices...Ultimately what's important is not … whether or not the challenged practices are anti-competitive."
Meanwhile, back in its silicon ranch, Microsoft started funding Yahoo's internet search service as part of a newly-formed partnership, with Yahoo commenting that Microsoft is to "reimburse us for the costs of running our algorithmic and paid search services". The reimbursements come in addition to the $150 million that Microsoft has agreed to pay Yahoo to help fund its transition under the partnership.
Much to Google’s irritation, the US Justice Department and European regulators cleared Yahoo's partnership with Microsoft. Google might be right to think that the two are ganging up on them as they claim fairer competition in the search market. And Yahoo must be relieved, as it views this partnership as going a long way in its bid to cutting costs and raising its operating margin to 20% within two years from now.
Not only does Google have ongoing issues with the Chinese government and the Microsoft-Yahoo partnership that has been allowed to go through, Yahoo now has an agreement with Twitter. Not to be out-routed by these corporate tie-ups, Google has launched Android, an iPhone lookalike in direct competition with Apple, and hopes it will tweet the verb into a buzz.
Six months ago, Carol Bartz, the president and CEO of Yahoo, announced:"We have never been a search company", which at the time sounded decidedly bizarre as the tie-up with Microsoft attests. But now, as competition in the search and mobile markets ratchets up, Yahoo has entered into another bout of in-fighting in the social media ring with its partnership with Twitter. This will allow tweets to be directly accessed within all Yahoo-related sites and comes at a time when the company announced a similar deal with Facebook.
Earlier this month, Google launched its own Twitter-based service, dubbed Google Buzz, which essentially copied most of Twitter's social networking features. Twitter, of course, is far more buzzier, and Yahoo has said its search engine results will display tweets in real time, with Google and Microsoft having executed their own respective deals with Twitter last year.
But Yahoo has taken a marginally different approach to its Twitter results than shown on Google or Bing, with two tweets being displayed alongside related YouTube links. Their emphasis is also on specific topics, with online properties, sports, entertainment and finance being advanced later this year.
Confused? Well I certainly am. There are so many similar services placed on so many different platforms. Where, for self-reference, I concluded, could I find an irrational description of this romantic pragmatism? I liked Lord Melchett's quip in the BBC's Black Adder series, which was abstractly and drunkenly delivered as: "You twist and turn like a ... twisty-turny thing". That helped. A bit.
And if anyone else finds a cogent correlation between Melchett and the corporate labyrinthine muddle above, good. If not, try Rorty. In his vision of an anti-representationlist transformation of common sense, he didn’t even attempt to name any concrete instruments that could serve as the means for the realisation of it. Instead, he merely hoped for a lucky turn of history, which could lead to the idiosyncratic mutations [that] once in a while seep down into common sense [where] the spin-offs ... turn out to have enormous social utility."
One day, perhaps, it might seem that way.
