Three years ago on this day, I began blogging. Blogging is so part of my life that I cannot imagine not doing it! Much of what I wrote in last year's series "Two Blog Years" still holds true. Look forward to another year of blogging, sharing ideas, reading your comments, and interacting with you.

John Martin writes:

I've been using ActionOutline for a few months now, and I have to say that I'm pretty happy with it. It's the first time I've used an outliner, so I don't have a lot to compare against, but it certainly does as advertised and mostly satisfies my current needs. Having said that though, the longer I use it the more things I find it useful for. Initially it was just for managing todo lists, but since then I've started doing a whole lot more, like outlining documents that I have to write, planning out software development, even creating presentations.

At the end of the day, the outliner is a platform that provides hierarchy and structure plumbing, plus a nifty compositing engine, plus a bunch of file system and network services.

WSJ writes:

In Asia, tiny cellphone screens have become electronic wallets that buy Coke from vending machines and contests that dole out McDonald's coupons on the phone screen to winners. A recent ad even encourages Japanese to use their cellphones to download a dancing spiny-legged mushroom named Docomo-dake, the mascot of wireless carrier NTT DoCoMo Inc.

Cellphones' ubiquity in Asia can provide a link between traditional ad channels, such as print and broadcast. Pfizer Inc.'s Acuvue contact lenses created a campaign for Japanese teens to "become part of the group, get talked about and get involved in their cellphones," says Rikiya Ikeda, media-planning director at Pfizer ad agency Universal-McCann Japan, a unit of Interpublic Group of Cos. The agency attached freebie cellphone accessories to billboards near schools; the accessories showed Acuvue's Web address. Acuvue's market share of two-week lenses jumped to 36% from 32%.

Globetechnology (Mathieu Balex) writes:

It is most likely developing a Google-branded version of Firefox — the up-and-coming Web-browser. There is no dearth of well-supported evidence on the Web pointing to this fact. Having its own browser out there grants Google the opportunity to package all of its services in one tidy delivery channel. It also further encroaches upon Microsoft's territory.

Most significantly however, it will be the opening move on the chessboard of next-generation desktop computing. I believe Google is vying to dethrone Microsoft as the potentate of PC dominance by pulling the rug out from underneath its feet, by changing the very rules of the operating system game itself. Not unlike its e-mail and mapping software, which are entirely Web-based, Google will release an operating system that will be completely networked and centralized on its servers. You will literally no longer need any software running on your local computer (except the Google Web-browser of course, and a network connection). The computing experience will involve booting your computer, logging into the net, and having access to all your programs (and most of your data) which will reside happily in the ether — all protected and secure, we will be assured, by the good god Google.

Google will realize the vision originally put forth by Sun Microsystems (which failed to really give it any meaning) — The Network is the Computer. The reason this model is so powerful is that it greatly simplifies software distribution — when there's a problem or an upgrade, only one copy of the software must be patched and everyone benefits from the update. Users will likely benefit from a more stable computing experience (if we ignore, for the moment, network congestion issues), since the OS will be configured and optimized for high-performance on massively parallel servers.

This paradigm also does away with software piracy, since any paid applications would now become subscription-based and thus impossible to hack (barring password theft). This means a huge opportunity for most software companies and a huge downer for the warez community.

It may also spell a sunshiney future for open source software, which Google smiles upon (its servers are powered by Linux). Recall that in its rapid rise to prominence, Google has amassed one of the largest networks of hardware on the planet. Leap forward a few years, when processing power and network bandwidth are essentially infinite, and you have the perfect pre-conditions for a completely virtualized operating system and application server environment.

Enterprise RSS points to a post by Elizabeth Albrycht which offers ideas on "deploying RSS internally as well as part of your employee communications, knowledge management, content management, and other systems."

In 1999, Search as a business was all but given up as a dead business by the incumbent players. And then along came Google – and the rest, as they say, is history. Today, there is perhaps no technology business as hot as Search. Everyone is clamouring for a piece of the action. What dot-com was once, Search is now – but with a difference. There is a clear revenue model – built primarily around advertising.

Along with many ideas, another business category died in the 2000 era. That was the business of providing software applications on a hosted basis. Application Service Providers (ASPs) were once touted as companies who would change the face of software delivery and make most of the incumbents obsolete. What happened? Little changed. Even though we have a few companies like Salesforce.com which comprise the next-generation of ASPs and have built successful businesses, for the most part, ASPs still remain few and far between.

Just because a technology or idea did not do well once, it does not mean that it needs to be written off entirely. For example, Apple’s Newton was way too early while the Palm Pilot had both timing and the right feature set to succeed when it came out. Timing is, in fact, very critical for the success of innovations. If one is too early, then one will languish till the critical mass is built. In the process, any number of things can go wrong.

Going back to the Search case study, companies like Yahoo, Lycos, Altavista and Excite led the charge. But they could not monetise the traffic that was there. As a result, investments into search technologies shrunk. Users were disillusioned with the results dished out. Attention shifted from search to all-encompassing portals. Advertising was limited to banner ads and suffered from diminishing returns.

Into this market strode Google with a clean user interface and a technology that dramatically improved the quality of results. Users once again flocked to search engines. Google (and Overture) came up with the idea of linking ads to search results. As Joe Kraus (an Excite co-founder) put it, Google figured out how to monetise the long tail of searches: “We couldn’t figure out how to make money from 97% of our traffic. We couldn’t figure out how to make money from the long tail – from those queries asked only once a day…Overture figured it out, Google perfected it and we all know what happened from there. Those guys figured out something revolutionary -- the long tail of search was a advertising marketplace.”

I believe that the ASP business is where Search was in 1999 – ripe for new entrants to come in and make a mark from the long tail (of enterprises). But first, let us take a walk down memory lane to understand the promise of ASPs and then analyse what went wrong in the first wave.

Tomorrow: Rationale