It almost felt like a royal wedding, when news came out that these two big vendors would work together. It received an almost unheard amount of coverage, but faithful readers may have already have seen this covered in my short WebSphere Portal evaluation from mid-February. Basically IBM will release a new version of WebSphere Portal in April, which will incorporate Google Gadgets. The gadgets are much like portlets (or "Web Parts" in Microsoft-lingo) and typically offer consumer-oriented functionality such as weather forecasts, countdowns, international clocks, moon phases, and biorhythms. In usual clever PR-style, Google calls this "the new portal", but it surely brings back memories from the old Web portals of the 90s. With the recent joint Yahoo! announcement, a pattern of a product innovation is emerging at IBM Perhaps it is no longer fair to say that IBM is catching up with the outside world, but just remember that we're talking about an unreleased product. And the question remains: Do businesses really need Google Gadgets?