History often repeats itself in the tech world and Joel Spolsky is seeing history repeating itself in the web application space. Using the example of Lotus in the office software space, he argues that the company lost relevance to Microsoft because it (wrongly) focused on optimizing performance and features for a platform (DOS) that was quickly becoming obsolete. In the meantime, Microsoft and Apple built really cool features for their office software and waited for platform capabilities to catch up (inevitably) due to Moore’s Law. He then equates Google to the latter-day Lotus, painting a scenario where Google smugly laughs off a bloated but feature-rich (imaginary) NewSDK from a bratty startup, only to then get disrupted by this SDK when browser capabilities improve. Of course, part of the analogy breaks down because Microsoft was hardly a bratty startup when it succeeded where Lotus failed.

The prediction was serious enough to elicit a response from a Googler who disagrees with this association. The analogy is very interesting, and in many ways, we are indeed seeing a similar evolutionary path in web applications. Joel identified three platform characteristics, namely, a portable programming language, high interactivity and UI standards as important phases in the desktop world, that will eventually happen in the web world. And, he suggests, whoever can gain traction doing all three will have as much impact as Microsoft Windows back in the desktop era. This might be the case, but the more interesting question is whether it is even possible to achieve dominance from scratch just by doing all three?

On the web today, we are not seeing a lack of effort towards language portability (open-source Javascript libraries like Prototype, JQuery or Dojo) high interactivity (Scriptaculous, Yahoo/Google Developers API, Google Web Toolkit) and UI standards (all the CSS frameworks and Yahoo UI Best Practices). There are even efforts that are heading towards a “cut-and-paste” functionality on the web, with efforts like Microformats, the Semantic Web, GData API and even XML standard markups in different domains. There are also companies (Backbase, Nexaweb, Bindows, Tibco General Interface, Bindows) aspiring to be Joel’s NewSDK by providing comprehensive tools for AJAX development. In some regards, you can argue that through Flash, Adobe has achieved all three in some important domains like video streaming, video conferencing and animations on the web, and with Flex and AIR, they are extending their ambitions to more general domains. The reigning giants are also not without ambitions in this area, with efforts like Microsoft’s Silverlight, and Google hiring Mozilla developers and developing client-side technologies like Google Gears. As you can see, many players, ranging from big companies to small startups to open-source projects, are already pretty active in moving web applications along its maturation path, but still no one is as dominant on the web as Microsoft was on the desktop.

Perhaps one needs to remember that Microsoft became dominant on the desktop through shrewd business tactics, not by being the OS that developers love best. BeOS, Next, Apple and Linux have all tried to challenge Microsoft directly on the desktop by providing more compelling features but Microsoft remains undefeated. Perhaps having massive distribution (whatever way you get it) is an important factor? There are a handful of companies who have varying degrees of massive distribution on the web; Google (through search), Adobe (through Flash), Yahoo (through the portal), Firefox/Mozilla (through the browser), Apple (through iTunes/iPod/digital entertainment), Facebook/MySpace (through social networking) and not the least, Microsoft (through Windows/IE, and not to forget, the inventor of Asynchronous Javascript, the AJ in AJAX). Would these companies be in a better position to be Joel’s NewSDK?

Yes, Joel is right in that history is indeed repeating itself in many ways, but it seems unlikely that anyone (especially Google) will be blindsided by a bratty upstart. If so, that startup will be making history, not repeating it.

A recent study from the Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that there is very little overlap between the front-page stories selected by traditional editors, social news sites and Yahoo News user recommendations. There is an interesting interpretation of this study from Nicholas Carr basically stating that if crowd-edited news were to take over the distribution of news, it will accelerate the “dumbing-down” of news.

This extrapolation might seem logical but it is done with a few assumptions that are highly debatable to the point of being downright unlikely. First, it assumes that social news sites are promoting mainstream news today, and uses the overlap with mainstream news as a metric to measure whether stories are dumb. Digg and Reddit might be aspiring to become more mainstream but this is not the case today. These sites are still largely serving a homogeneous technology-oriented user base, a niche community where stories about the iPhone are perfectly informative, interesting (and not dumb) to the community (which is kind of the point of a community news site). Second, it assumes that the social news community (the crowd) will stay constant as social news sites evolve to “take over” mainstream news dissemination. It is more likely that as Digg and Reddit (or new entrants) evolve beyond their niche focus, they will gain critical mass in a more diverse demographic and in turn, this diversity will influence and change the nature of their front-pages. Finally, Carr assumes that the editors of mainstream news sources get to define what’s “smart news.” There is no reason to believe that’s true. This certainly doesn’t guarantee that social news sites will work for a mass audience beyond the core crowds, but there’s nothing in the current results to suggest that any of Carr’s assumptions are accurate or that social news dumbs down anything. In fact, given how promiscuous people are with their news sources, the idea that a single source would help dumb down the news seems fairly ridiculous.

As the best thinkers are discussing the future of AI at the Singularity Summit, perhaps we shouldn’t just be looking at ways to create better computer artificial intelligence, but at ways to more efficiently make use of human intelligence that’s available all the time. For example, take a look at the technologies being used to harness human cognitive abilities to help in the search for Steve Fossett’s plane in the vast desert of Nevada. Searchers are leveraging Amazon’s Mechanical Turk community to quickly scan through Google Earth satellite imagery to flag areas where the plane might have crashed or eliminate barren areas where rescue pilots shouldn’t focus on. At the time of this post, there are still over 100,000 blocks to be looked over with each block representing a 278×278 sq ft. area. At what appears to be a scanning rate of about 10-20 square grids/sec by the Turk community, the entire area of interest could theoretically be searched in less than 5 hours — assuming that the system isn’t showing the same photo to multiple people (as appears to be the case). Contrast that to the (super)computing resources required to process an equivalent image of more than 8 billion pixels (img dimension(256×256) x (numOfImgs)100k), on top of the difficult task of defining the object-of-interest to a computer (what does a plane wreck look like to a computer?).

In this instance, using simple coordination mechanisms, human intelligence becomes an economic way to solve a hard problem — which is exactly the rationale behind Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. We have seen projects using other hooks and mechanisms to leverage human intelligence, like Recaptcha for OCRing books, and the ESP game for tagging images — and even the Techdirt Insight Community, which is bringing you this post. On a grander scale, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is trying to be a platform for “artificial artificial intelligence”, though so far the success stories for MTurk have been minor. Even in this case, it’s not entirely clear how useful it is (or how they got the latest satellite imagery ready to go for this task). In fact, while there are fairly stunning reports that, in searching for Fossett, the remains of eight other plane crashes have been discovered — it doesn’t sound like any of them were found via Mechanical Turk and Google Earth. Still, with all this talk about mashing up web services and better artificial intelligence, perhaps it’s time we start thinking about more effective and efficient ways of leveraging human intelligence?

Startups today are bringing big-company benefits to their employees because they can. Now, company cooks can share in the rewards of an IPO, because seriously, what the programmers eat can affect the quality of the code they write. 🙂 For eg. sushi always produces clean efficient lines of code.

An article about how Netiva, which was once a hot startup from the Java fund, reinvented itself to become Portera Systems with a different business model and products than what it started with. Not many startups get a second chance like that, but having influential backers definitely makes it easier.

After the Chris Nolan ‘scandal’, a Fortune journalist writes more about F&F shares. It looks like journalists covering the hi-tech industry are often offered F&F shares, not always necessary because they are friends or family to anyone in the IPOing company. I guess in those cases, there will be more questions of ethics.

Cisco continues its aggressive acquisition strategy by gobbling up Cerent Corp. and Monterrey Networks for a reported $7.4 billion. The people responsible for integrating all these new companies into Cisco must be near burnout. This is reminiscent of the days when Microsoft was acquiring companies aggressively. Like software companies back then, i think many new network companies are starting up just waiting to be acquired by Cisco, which is not a bad exit strategy at all, looking at the price Cisco is willing to pay.

An article mainly about iTixs, one of the supposedly hot startups keeping its idea in the dark while creating great buzz. Telling the world that you’re in stealth mode is definitely the trend nowadays. Companies with catchy decoy names become press darlings when they launch just because people have been wondering what they’re doing for months. Apparently, it has other good effects like generating a lot of employment leads and your landlord treating you nicer.

One wonders what investors are smoking when they give Webvan a $4 billion dollar valuation. It’s been discovered that they are inhaling smoke from burning the money that they have plenty of. Is WebVan going to be another Iridium in the making or is it really a Safeway killer ?

It is interesting to see new companies pop up with business models around the open source concept. Now instead of just packaging and providing support for open-source software, these companies want to be the middlemen between folks who are willing to pay for software projects and programmers who are willing to contribute. They also want to host projects for free and hope someone will sponsor them. There are definitely a lot of cool aspects to this model. If it takes off, the world will see lots of free quality software, with quick release cycles and QAed by the rest of the world.