Steve Jobs mentions describes one of computing's most pressing problems: searching for files and information stored on the desktop. "Search is a problem for every personal computer company," Mr. Jobs said in an interview at the Apple Worldwide Developer conference. "It's easier to find a document in a million pages on the Web using Google than it is to find a document on your hard drive."
Interesting point - I would just generalize it beyond searching the hard drive. Its absolutely true, search is a huge problem -- not because of the search technology though, but because what you end up finding is mostly old junk.
Search the corporate data dumpster (sorry, archive) and you can get various types of files like Word and PowerPoint and possibly some outdated web pages etc. The documents that you find provide no clue as to who was involved in creating them, no idea what the decision making process was, and often no idea what "alternatives" were discussed and not incorporated. Is the document authoritative? You have no idea, just the sneaking suspicion that the real process happened in email exchanges that you have no access to and can't search anyway.
It not search that's the problem, its the medium. Documents (files) are like photographs - a snapshot frozen in time. Blogs are like video. You can see and hear the people interact, you can rewind, you have a context for the conversation, and the result is that a great deal more information gets transferred.
Documents are great for legal contracts, email is great for communicating with a few people, but blogs should replace the corporate data dumpsters. Then you could just search the "internal web" to find what you need.
10:44:34 AM 
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