I know this storyis all over the news, especially on Mac sites, but I wanted to call it out for another reason: as with the Google purchase of Keyhole, this is a purchase of a desktop software company by a web software company. I see these purchases as signs of that long term platform shift that I’ve been calling Web 2.0.
I predicted this kind of thing in my open source paradigm shift talk at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention back in 2003, with the intentionally “out there” prediction that eBay would one day be in a position to buy Oracle. We’re not that far along the curve yet, but the expectation that web companies will only buy other web companies should be put firmly into the trash bin.