Thomas Friedman has it right with his main point, that what others think of us, and the ability of others to communicate, matters more--put simply, as the six British soldiers found when they died by mob the other day, all the military might in the world is not going to matter when billions decide to overrun Europe from Africa, Russia from China, and the US from south of the border. Goggle is good and getting better, but here are two reasons why it is a bishop at best: 1) Google technical people (disclosure, they blew off the ideas at oss.net) are enamoured of their original algorithms and not willing to take on the micro-cash, copyright, and audit issues associated with googleizing privately owned information that can then be accessed a la carte in both moderated and unmoderated form, on a cash and carry basis; and 2) they don't seem to be focused on the importance of getting a solid partnership going with the various language translations softwares that Bill Gates is "shutting out" of cyberspace. There are a whole range of concepts from the US intelligence community (which is half brilliant, half village idiot, its the brilliant part we want Google to think about) that could indeed allow Google to become the information merchant bank and true information commons for the world. They do great with what is there now--my estimate is that they will never be more than a 20% solution unless they set some standards, adopt multi-level security algorithms that allow the sharing of government secret and corporation confidential information, and get serious about language translation.