Moneychangeseverything.com

Does money change everything? It must, or there wouldn't be a song that says so. But I couldn't help thinking so this morning, because I went to hear Nathan Myrvold, the former Microsoft genius-prognosticator, and Marissa Mayer, the Google goddess, be interviewed about the future by the New Yorker's Ken Auletta. "We're going to peer over the horizon," Auletta said, and got right to the point: What did Myrvold think about the YouTube deal?

Myrvold replied: "The only way to know if a deal is good or bad is in retrospect."

I couldn't believe it. This is the answer to a question from a futurist? From a provocateur? I mean, obviously. Obviously the only way to know if a deal is good or bad is in retrospect, but that's not the way the world works. That's not the Nathan Myrvold I went to see. What's going on?

I first saw Myrvold at the dawn of the current era, at a conference the New Yorker Magazine held in 1997. Myrvold drove everyone there practically nuts by predicting the end of print as we know it. He sat up on the stage looking as merry as Old King Cole as the writers in the audience bristled and bridled and threw unbelievably insulting and elliptical questions back at him. He didn't care. He had seen the future. Print was just a temporary blip in the sands of time. He didn't even seem to understand the concept of narrative or the power of the story.

I've followed Myrvold's career in the meantime - he left Microsoft, bought a plane for himself, and started his own company, Intellectual Ventures - but it never crossed my mind that I would ever find him nine years later talking sentimentally about copyright. I mean, copyright? Even I have given up on copyright. I feel about copyright exactly the way Myrvold felt in 1997 about the end of print as we know it. But Myrvold seems to have fallen in love with copyright. He used it to attack the YouTube deal - "But they don't own the content" seems to be the current conventional-wisdom-slash-Schadenfreude comment to make about the YouTube deal - and went on to say, in what I think was meant to be a moving moment, that he had ordered his twins to pay for their music downloads, even though none of their friends do. "Copyright built our house," Myrvold said. "I told them, as long as you're sleeping here, you have to respect copyright."

As for the other member of the panel, Marissa Mayer, who was on the cover of Newsweek recently (not that anyone is reading Newsweek any more because while not all print is dead, some print is dead) she turned out to be as nostalgic in her way as Myrvold, although it was slightly harder to tell: in what I have noticed is a disturbing trend among powerful young women in the Internet business, Mayer speaks so quickly you can barely keep up with what she says. But she said she still believed in going to the movies and reading newspapers and magazines. "I'm just old-fashioned," she said. In fact, Mayer said that the biggest breakthrough she'd had at Google was that she'd begun holding office hours just as her professors did in college - she started with an hour a week and is now up to ninety minutes a day when anyone in the company can just drop in on her for a few minutes without an appointment. And speaking of sentimental, there was almost not a dry eye in the house when she got done talking about the money-making Google breakthroughs that had occurred as a result of this most old-fashioned concept.

Google is of course so hot and so huge and such a brand - "brand" was the word du jour, no question -- that no one ever seems to state the obvious, which is that Google, in warp time, has gotten too big to be remotely useful. So I was thrilled when Joe Nocera of the New York Times stood up to complain about internet search engines and said, "When are you going to get to a point when you can ask a simple question and get a simple answer?"

Well, here's a simple question: Does money change everything?

Yes.