Is *all* innovation good??

This is a seeming no-brainer, pitting anti-technology types against technology progressives. Yet in today's NYTimes I read an article about Craig Venter's success in creating the first synthetic DNA sequence, which his scientists are planning to put in a cellular shell and start growing into an organism. This would be a first. The article goes on to quote Venter as he discusses miraculous capabilities living cells and organisms possess.

“We have micro-organisms that live in such strong acid or base solutions that if you put your finger in, the skin would dissolve almost instantly,” Dr. Venter said in an interview. “There’s another organism that can take three million rads of radiation and not be killed.” How can a microbe withstand a blast of radioactivity that is a good 1,500 times greater than what would kill any of us virtually on the spot? “Its chromosome gets blown apart,” Dr. Venter said, “but it stitches everything back together and just starts replicating again.” - New York Times, Feb 5, 2008.

In response to this remarkable achievement I couldn't help but conjure up the film, Jurassic Park, and fired off a letter to the editor:

To the Editor,

Given what we already know about the adaptability and seeming indestructibility of various natural lifeforms (Synthetic Life, Science Times, 2/5/08), the reality of synthetic lifeforms scares me. In an age where spam, identity theft and hackers continue to plague internet users despite the expenditure of billions of dollars to combat them, how could we possibly have the hubris to believe we can control a new life form that happens to have a malevolent modus operandi?

Scary stuff, I reckon.

evhead: The Focus Paradox

evhead: The Focus Paradox

So EvHead wrote on his blog:

Both Facebook and Google had early success in (large?) part because of their focus. Google in terms of what they did, Facebook in terms of who could use it.
That success provided both pressure and opportunities to grow in new directions. Expansion is always tricky, and each company has handled it in different ways.
Discuss.

Reminds me of an article from the early 90s about the degree to which tech companies can successfully vertically integrate. For instance, in computers you've got

hardware
components
hardware systems (ie, computers)
operating systems
middleware
software (apps)
content

The argument was that companies that tried to go farther than two levels above or below the one that was their core business would struggle. So take IBM. Core business initially was hardware. They also quickly got into components, like hard drives, which made sense for them. And they had to write their own O/S because no one else built the big boxes. Made sense. Same thing with some of the middleware apps, like DB2 (if that could be considered middleware). But look what happened when they tried to do software apps - when they bought Lotus. Notes could be considered a middleware app - it really is just a development environment, not an app. Most companies didn't appreciate that. But the real Lotus apps - 123, WordPro, and Freelance Graphics - are pretty much gone. IBM paid around $3 b for all this stuff, and couldn't make a successful run on Big Bill.

So....If I was Google or Facebook, I'd be thinking about the levels thing. First, what *are* the levels in the webworld? I've seen lists of them before, but I don't have them at hand. Then, what would represent "two steps" in either direction from search?