Humans vs. Computers, Again. But There's Help for Our Side.

E'VE seen this pattern before in the computer world: many companies scrambling at the same time to solve the same problem. Sometimes the concentration of effort mainly ends up underscoring how hard it can be to solve a given problem, like controlling spam or designing laptop batteries that last as long as they should. At other times, the problem everyone is tackling yields to steady year-by-year technological progress. Disk drives and other storage devices grow ever cheaper and more reliable. Transmission speeds over modems keep going up.

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But often such races result in true breakthroughs that make computers much more useful and creates countless opportunities for follow-on innovations and products. More than 20 years ago, the introduction of spreadsheets - first VisiCalc, then Lotus 1-2-3 - essentially created the personal computer industry by convincing businesses that PC's were tools, not gizmos. Over the last 10 years, Tim Berners-Lee, who is not getting rich, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who are, have made the modern Internet possible. Mr. Berners-Lee did so by creating the technical standard for Web pages and offering it as a public utility; Mr. Page and Mr. Brin, by creating Google, which is a public service but a private company.

A current race for a solution goes by the deceptively blah name of "knowledge management," or K.M. It is an effort to bring Google-like clarity to the swamp of data on each person's machine or network, and it is based on the underappreciated tension between a computer's capacity and a person's. Modern computers "scale" well, as the technologists say - that is, the amount of information they can receive, display and store goes up almost without limit. Human beings don't scale. They have finite amounts of time, attention and, even when they're younger than the doddering baby boomers, short-term memory. The more e-mail, Web links and attached files lodged in their computer systems, the harder it can be for people to find what they really want.

If anything, the challenge of helping people find their own information is harder than what Google has done. Search engines let you explore sites you haven't seen before. Knowledge management systems should let you easily retrieve that Web page, that phone number, that interesting memo you saw last month and meant to do something with.

The current creative struggle is important because, when it yields a victor, it will leave everyone less frustrated about using a computer. What makes the struggle intriguing is that it involves two great axes of competition. On the business level, it is another installment of that ancient tale, Microsoft vs. the World. On the conceptual level, it raises basic questions about what knowledge is.

Microsoft is automatically a player in any software competition, but its role here is unusual because of its two-front approach. Bill Gates has talked for years about the headache of trying to find what you want on your computer and has presumably heard every surly retort about Windows itself being the real source of pain. The next big release, which is scheduled to appear within two years and now has the code name Longhorn, will have a variety of new file-retrieval features built in.

If operating system upgrades are Microsoft's "hard power," it also offers a soft-power approach to the K.M. problem, with a program that looks and feels different from anything the company has offered previously. This product, OneNote, is costly - $199, but with a free trial - and is still a promising glimmer more than a realized solution. But its goal is to provide an easy, elegant way to lodge bits of significant information and then get them back at the right time. Oddball disclosure: I worked with the team now responsible for OneNote during a brief stint at Microsoft five years ago.

THEN there is everyone else. There must be hundreds of programs designed to give users better command of their own data. I know that I have tried at least 50 of them. They have names like ADM, askSam, BrainStorm, Chandler, Enfish, InfoSelect, iRider, Lookout, Onfolio, TheBrain and Zoot. Their prices range from zero to about $100, and nearly all of them do something useful.

The business drama now is whether any of these companies can attain enough of an independent, Google-like identity to co-exist with Microsoft - or whether users will have to wait for future Windows versions with the best features built in.

The underlying intellectual question about knowledge management is whether people actually think of knowledge as a big heap of laundry just out of the dryer, or as neatly folded pajamas, shirts and so on, all placed in the proper drawers. The "big heap" theory lies behind some of the programs: we don't care where or how things are stored; we just want to find certain pairs of socks - or P.D.F. files - exactly when we need them. The "folded PJ's" theory guides a variety of programs that let you mark information as it shows up - for instance, tagging an article you know you want to refer to later, when shopping for a new car. Brains work both ways, and the ideal K.M. software will, too.

Google's success suggests that there is a huge potential for solving a problem that people didn't realize they had until the right solution appeared. I wish all contestants well in this knowledge management race.

James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly. E-mail: tfiles@nytimes.com.

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