"Quaero aims to be a multimedia search engine that will work across all online digital media platforms including PCs, mobile phones, set-top-boxes and handheld devices. The engine will index content in several languages and will provide content management tools for media producers to promote their material."
This is my favourite bit:
"But after seeing that Quaero's German and French researchers were working in different directions, the project split in December 2006, with the French continuing to work on Quaero and the Germans focused on Theseus. Managers from both projects have, however, said they will meet regularly to form synergies when possible."
Like I said - bickering.
However, no corporate group can ever perform well. One company running in a form of dictatorship over their product, like Jobs, can react quickly and, even for a large company, remain competative. However, if every decision has to go through multiple screening processes, tests, etc. you end up with a production cycle equivalent of Microsoft.
The Quaero project is doomed to failure. Not only is it going to have corporate bickering, but it's going to be in multiple languages. You can bet a large number of coders will enter from the UK, Netherlands and many other countries.
This means you're going to need translators to get the documents to read correctly in each individual language, or there's going to be many screw ups. Not only that, but you'll be faced with several days delay between project heads to get to a meeting. Bascially for a weekly status update, it would take probably 3 days to get everything translated and checked. So it's a weekly-3 status update, and what you did today is never going to be on the agenda, it's going to be the 3rd day on the next agenda, by which time something important is gone from your focus.
I belive the best words to describe this are, eww, and, no!
I suppose the political logic was something like, "What's hot right now? Google. Why don't we have one? Well, let's fix that."
On the other side, doubly so in Berlin where I'm based, there is significant funding for startups available especially once they start creating jobs. We're planning on tapping that once we get far enough in. At least as best as I can judge, Berlin's one of the hot-spots for startups in Europe right now.