Saturday, December 31, 2005

An explosion of technological evolution

I'm lucky to meet some really sharp folks at internet conferences. One such clever fellow is Andy Edmonds - Mozilla Hacker and Microsoft's search relevancy researcher who writes in his blog:

The technological and attentional commons of the internet has created a radioactively boosted level of technology evolution. It sputters and backfires, but through a nefariously faceted backbone of communications, competition, and collaboration infrastructure is resulting in interesting new forms of business and user activity.
In fact, one might view the rise of Firefox in this light.

You might need to read it again to digest it, but these are simple yet profound points:
The internet is increasingly fertile ground for an explosion of technological evolution.

Variations on this theme are what I'm hearing from many of the clever guys at Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Both the companies and the engineers are passionate about what they are doing and, for the most part, recognize that many of the old rules of carefully guarded proprietary software developments are pretty much out the window.

As if to hammer this last point home Amazon just released the Alexa Search Engine API for pretty much anything anybody wants to do with it. This was not front page news, even online, but reflects what Andy's talking about in a big way....things are changing....fast.

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