April 26, 2006
TO BE ABLE TO MARCH INTO HELL FOR A HEAVENLY CAUSE
Chirac unveils his grand plan to restore French pride (Angelique Chrisafis, The Guardian, April 26th,2006)
The French president, Jacques Chirac, yesterday unveiled what he hopes will be his great legacy to France's struggle against the global dominance of the US: a series of technological projects including a European search engine to rival Google.Mr Chirac, who walked out of an EU summit last month when a fellow Frenchman committed the grave offence of speaking English, styles himself as the defender of France in the globalised world.
After the biggest street protests in decades forced him to stage a U-turn on employment reform last month, Mr Chirac is keener than ever to be remembered for doing something positive for French pride. Yesterday, he announced that he would provide €2bn (£1.4bn) in funding for a series of innovative grands projets, including a Franco-German search engine to compete with Google and Yahoo!.
Named Quaero - Latin for "I search" - the search engine aims to be the first to efficiently sort through audio, images and video. It would search the growing array of podcasts and videoclips on the web and deliver the information to computers and mobile phones. Quaero has been a pet project of Mr Chirac's for some time. In his new year speech at the Elysée Palace, he spoke of the need to "take up the global challenge posed by Google and Yahoo!".
A government-sponsored Internet search engine in French? We would have counseled taking a page from the Gideons and distributing complimentary copies of Being and Nothingness in the worlds’ hotel rooms, but we've always lacked the vision thing.
"Quaero" kind of sounds like it could be a Hyundai.
Dollars to donuts (francs to brioches?) they'll be calling it "le search engine" before not too long.
Proudly, of course.
Posted by: Barry Meislin at April 26, 2006 8:00 AMWhat better way to keep them out of trouble than to assign them the task of perpetualy reinventing the wheel?
Posted by: Mikey at April 26, 2006 8:23 AMKeyword "surrendermonkey".
Posted by: JsK at April 26, 2006 9:29 AMKeyword "surrendermonkey".
Posted by: JonSK at April 26, 2006 9:35 AMhe spoke of the need to "take up the global challenge posed by Google and Yahoo!
So having given up trying to rise up to the challenge posed by Americans militarily or Eastern Europeans economically or Mickey Mouse and Muslim immigrants culturally, Jacques sets his sights on Yahoo! and Google.
Looks like they'll have add a new wing to the Hotel des Invalides to fairly memorialize the vastness of the glory that was the Chirac Era.
Posted by: Dreadnought at April 26, 2006 11:01 AMHas M. President forgotten Groupe Bull?
Posted by: ratbert at April 26, 2006 12:10 PMThey will use that money to search the world and eventually buy a start-up from us. BTW, Cypress Semiconductor was French, the guy who invented digital data compression enabling file and image sharing, creating MPEG, etc. was French. The best and the brightest French are already successful entrepreneurs, the problem with France is they are Americans now.
Posted by: ic at April 26, 2006 1:38 PMI don't get it. You can already configure Google to present its user interface in numerous languages (including French). You can also quite readily enter search terms in French (or any language). Are they planning on spending $1.4 billion (a breathtaking amount for a software development project) on developing a search engine, going up against, of all entities, Google, a company that is innovating faster than Microsoft or Yahoo! can keep up? Even with that kind of start-up capital, it's a very questionable business decision. Even if -- a big if -- they were to out-innovate Google in search technology and come up with a better engine, what is the biz model? How will it generate revenue? They will have to offer user interface for their search engine in all the world's maor languages -- especially English -- in order to be taken seriously as an alternative search engine. It's easy to envision a world with huge numbers of people using Google in French and Chinese (because it already exists). Microsoft with all its resources (and international business strategy) is scared ****less of Google. Very difficult to imagine billions using Quaero in English, or even in French. Or posing more of a threat to Google than Microsoft. Designing French pride. Now there's a coding project.
Posted by: Pepe LePew at April 26, 2006 4:31 PMMr. LePew;
What's to get? As you wrote, the project will be "spending $1.4 billion". You didn't think there was more to it than that, did you?
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at April 26, 2006 4:46 PMWell, US$ 2.5 billion.
Posted by: Michael Herdegen![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://brothersjuddblog.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at April 26, 2006 8:16 PM