actually, a recent study showed that people who multi-task perform poorly on those tasks where they are multi-tasking, and those who think they are the best multi-taskers perform the poorest. Not all social change is necessarily good. The advent of TV and fast food. No big deal right? Except for the catastrophic levels of type II diabetes we are seeing develop in our older populations. I love this quote by girlintraining: "Sure, but how many of your 40+ employees can key data at over 100 WPM, carry on six different conversations at once (and keep them separated), and perform a rather wide variety of small jobs under rapidly changing circumstances -- and do it well? How many of them will self-organize into groups to tackle a problem without formal leadership? These are the strengths of this generation" This isn't the strength of this generation. This is the delusion of this generation. The world is hierarchical. There are reasons why we have leadership. The biggest has to do with experience. You don't get experience from books or internet surfing, nor any amount of world of warcrafting or second lifeing. This generation thinks that being able to handle large amounts of streaming, pointless information is an asset. The only people who usefully deal with large amounts of data and information are engineers, statisticians, and programmers. This generation is simply a bunch of information couch potatoes. The successors to the TV couch potato generation.

Do you not get the point that by running in a browser, it essentially runs anywhere? Linux, Mac, Windows, future smartphones and MIDS. Further, by running in the browser, the application will always be the most current version. You won't have people running outlook version x, y, and z. Social communication or whatever you want to call it is a huge area of growth and a direction the internets is going. Would you rather have Google or Facebook the steward? Google very much tries to be open and "not evil." I honestly don't get the Google bashing.