Yesterday, this space suggested that Google might be forced to learn to share.

In "Revenge of the Middlemen," Rough Type, which is tech guru Nicholas Carr, author of Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage, comments on reports that Google is negotiating to pay Dell a hefty fee to put a Google software package/home page on Dell machines.

His summation:

The search giants, in other words, don't only compete for profits with one another, but with device makers, network operators, advertisers, content sites, and users themselves. In the future, the currently vast profit pool in on-line advertising will likely be split up among those players, and others, in very different ways than it has been up to now.