adoption curve dot net

There’s something for everyone on the internet – this is the drafting pencil museum, dedicated to preserving knowledge about hollow sticks that hold pencil leads.

Which reminded me of the set of my dad’s old draughting tools that lived in a box of bits and pieces while I was a kid. There was something uniquely fascinating about the dividers and the compasses and the pens that you adjusted the width of by turning a tiny knurled screw. Needless to say, the fascination of tiny knurled screws to ten year-olds meant that my brother and I trashed them completely over the years. They’d probably be worth a small fortune to a collector by now.

Would it make me too much of a geek to state publicly that I rather like the sound of this?

Via Guardian Online, the CEO of Forrester Research sticks the boot into the pending will-they-won’t-they Google IPO.

Leaving aside for a moment that it was the likes of Forrester Research who were as responsible as the VC funds and MSNBC for hyping up the dot.com boom, he’s actually got a point about the fact that Google’s technology is a farily indefensible advantage:

Yes, Google’s scheme yields fantastic results. But the Web is inexorably dynamic. During the next five years, it will move from containing primarily file-based content (HTML pages) to containing more executable content (e.g., online gaming or new structure imposed by Web services such as XML). When that happens, the usefulness of link-based search will wane. Simply stated, Google is very much of the times, with no advantage in the more structured, executable Internet that lies ahead.

The usefulness of link-based searches are already adversely affected by movements in pages – Googling for ‘Chris Moyles’ pulls up a page of mine about two-thirds of the way down – but clicking through lands on an entirely different page since a minor cockup reimporting the Moveable Type database. I suppose eventually the Googlebot will sort this out when it spiders me again, but in the meantime there’s a semi-broken link polluting the results.

Having disposed of that, he opines about the IPO price:

So you get the message–I like Google. But the hype, silliness and rumored $15 billion-plus market cap of the company’s impending IPO beckons. Is Google’s search good? Yes. Is the company worth tens of billions? No.

Actually, I think that’s missing the point. The IPO price of Google will be a function of what people will be prepared to pay for it – and I don’t believe that everyone has recovered from the collective loss of sanity that the last stock market boom was. The fact that there is hype and silliness and talk of $15 billion suggests that there’s still plenty of people out there prepared to bet their shirts on the next big thing.