Bill Gates was right. But he doesn't know it.

I was prompted by an article today at The Register to read an old column by Bill Gates, in which he states "Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting". It actually looks like he may end being right, although the way it pans out in the Web 2.0 world is probably not quite what he expected.

Ironically, this comes in an article reporting Microsoft's rumoured interest in eBay, which it now favours over Yahoo!. Why ? Well, apparently, "Microsoft turned more attention onto eBay recently after Gates decided that Yahoo! was a content company rather than technology company, and that he was not interested in owning a content company".

With the growth of open source and / or free software, and cheap or free internet access, it seems to me at least that content, and good technology to search and provide access to that content, is actually one of the few viable long term business models on the web. But I'm not Bill Gates...