The enemy of my enemy is my friend
One of my goals with this blog is to help people to understand that the energy debates are not just a discussion about technology – it is also a very important financial “game”. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to tell which “team” many of the participants in the energy are on – there are a lot of players that have multiple affiliations.
(GE, for example is a wind turbine company, a supplier of natural gas burning turbines, a nuclear fuel supplier, a supplier of supercritical steam plant components used by coal fired power plants, and probably builds major components for ethanol production. The Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) consults for natural gas companies, utility companies, and government agencies, but it also invests in super light automobile production and fights nuclear power tooth and nail.)
One way of gaining energy industry insight is to seek to understand how analogs in other businesses work. For example, there is an interesting blog post on TechCrunch titled Yahoo! Says They’re Not Building A Library.
For those of you that do not follow the business aspects of the tech world, the background of the post is that it is a comment about one battle ground in the growing Google/Yahoo wars over dominance in key Internet markets – this one happens to be about searching library books and making the results available for searching on the Web.
