Microsoft-Yahoo deal is big all right, but is it the next big thing?

Or maybe it will be something else entirely.

No one really knows, of course, but gambling on the future is the essence of Silicon Valley. Everyone chases the next big thing, knowing it could very well be the wrong thing. And those who guess wrong risk their survival. That is why front-runners do not stay front-runners for long. Many big names of the 1980s — Commodore, Tandem, Digital Equipment and MicroPro — are in a graveyard shared by the highfliers of the 1990 — the At Home Network, Netscape and Infoseek, to name a few.

Now Yahoo, founded by Stanford graduate students who became media darlings and instant billionaires after an exhilarating initial public offering of stock, may be the next to disappear. And Yahoo, which is based in Sunnyvale, California, is only 13 years old.

Microsoft wants to buy the company for $44.6 billion as its way to compete with Google, the hot company of this decade, which was also founded by Stanford graduate students who became media darlings and instant billionaires after an exhilarating initial public offering.

“This is the very nature of the Valley,” said Jim Breyer of the venture capital firm Accel Partners. “After very strong growth, businesses by definition start to slow as competition increases and young creative start-ups begin to attack the incumbents.” The economist Joseph Alois Schumpeter had a name for this principle of capitalism: creative destruction. Perhaps nowhere does it play out more dramatically — and more rapidly — than in Silicon Valley, where innovation unleashes a force that creates and destroys, over and over.

Microsoft, at the still-young age of 32, is making its largest acquisition because it, too, is affected by this force. Founded in 1975, Microsoft has had a longer run than most tech companies largely because it became very good at chasing the next big thing: an operating system, point-and-click computing, software for servers, Web services, video games, and, most recently, Internet search and online advertising. Technological innovation may not have always been what gave Microsoft the edge. It has been frequently criticised for me-tooism and for getting it right the third time.

Sometimes, marketing skill and bullying seemed also to be keys to its success. (To be fair, the creative use of those skills can also be regarded as a form of innovation.) Microsoft won huge business battles, starting with its domination of personal-computer software against Apple during the 1980s.

A decade later, it made quick work of Netscape Communications, which popularised Web browsing in the mid-1990s. While Microsoft remains very profitable because of its lock on desktop software, its efforts to dislodge the Valley’s leading third-generation Internet company, Google, have so far failed.

Google’s central innovation, Internet search, has confounded Microsoft, despite investing billions in both technology development and numerous smaller acquisitions. Internet technology has overtaken the PC desktop as the centre of the action, as people increasingly view the computer as merely a doorway to their virtual world. Google calls this phenomenon “cloud computing.”