Tim O'Reilly: "I believe that we're collectively working on an Internet Operating System, and that it will ultimately look more like Unix than it looks like Windows. That is, it will be an aggregate of best of breed tools produced by an army of independent actors, all playing by the same rules so that those tools work together to produce a whole greater than the sum of the parts.

Fighting over search is a bit like the Free Software Foundation re-implementing cat, ls, sort, and all the other Unix utilities that were already available in the Berkeley distributions of Unix. The real problem was solved by someone outside the FSF, when Linus Torvalds wrote a kernel, a missing piece that became the gravitational center of Linux, the center around which all of the other projects could coalesce, which made them more valuable not by competing with them but by completing them."

if the analogy travels, then today, the real (commercial) value is in the distros and surrounding support models; what parts of the kernel that are not 'just for fun' are patronised.

More important is that search is not part of the command set like it was a few years ago. It's replacing the desktop and filesystem as the de-facto user interface metaphor. When you add in  tagging, the idea of having well named files and using folders to organise all your stuff  seems quaint. And terribly inefficient.

"If you have three pet dogs, give them names. If you have 10,000 head of cattle, don't bother. Nowadays the idea of giving a name to every file on your computer is ridiculous." - David Gelernter

Finding a good system metaphor is hard work. Even files seem to be going away in favour of a simplistic version of Gelernter's "lifestreams" - time ordered collections of data, which these days we call 'feeds' (and if files are going away what does mean for Unix metaphors?). For example, gradual shifting of UI metaphors is one reason why AtomPub will replace WebDAV - even though WebDAV arguably addresses problems that AtomPub does not, WebDAV derives directly from the office/windows metaphor via network shares, whereas AtomPub metaphor is tied to time ordered data, tagging and suchlike.