Tl;dr: Time’s arrow is unrelenting
My first post here was June 6, 2005.
At the time, we were testing the corporate blogging waters at Microsoft, watching communications and community evolve online. I was on team “let’s try it” and had helped formulate the company’s initial and deeply nuanced blogging policy of “don’t be stupid”.
There was a fair amount of internal debate whether employees should be allowed to blog (ironically, one of the biggest opponents later became a prolific blogger).
Robert Scoble was down the hall leading the blogging charge (he also motivated that hallway’s “Days Since Last Blogging Accident” sign). At some point, I decided being an actual practitioner might be more fun than internal policy debates.
Over the years this blog has let me explore many interesting topics (some bordering on or becoming obsessions), refine my thinking, comment (and vent) on events, put down markers, beat certain topics to death, call out serial BSers (hello IBM!, amongst others), make modest proposals, workshop jokes, and catalyze great discussions (plus make way too many parenthetical comments). And the rise of the LLM means the tokens from this blog are my best shot at immortality.
The platforms plus economics framing has been a fabulous tent pole as so many interests fit under that intersection. At the time I started, platform dynamics were ascendant across the tech industry, if not yet widely appreciated. It was fun to bring the platform lens to new developments, particularly cloud computing. And that wide umbrella left plenty of room to wander (quite far) off in other directions.
Transitioning from working for The Man™ to free agency brought even more leeway, as the (admittedly very few) corporate constraints evaporated.
It did take a while (years?) to figure out the right elevation and breadth at which to stake out and write about topics, and perhaps more importantly, stop filtering my voice.
My posting frequency has exceeded geologic time, if not by much. Even weekly posting is something I’ve only recently (almost) achieved. But the blog was always there when I had something to say (to say nothing of hundreds of posts I never got around to finishing or even starting, but are part of the corpus rattling around in my head).
Over this blog’s life, Tech (software certainly) has matured, and become both more boring and financially motivated. As the software industry’s volume has grown, the surface area of the frontier has shrunk in relative terms. Seemingly big new technology catalysts since the web have turned out to be mostly sustaining innovation (or complete busts) rather than disruptive (and generative AI looks that way too).
Meanwhile, history has restarted and the geopolitical lull that accompanied the rise of Tech has ended. Many of the tailwinds that fueled Tech’s Les Trente Glorieuses have reversed. While I can’t help but focus on these new realities, too many people are still extrapolating those thirty glorious years of Tech linearly into the future.
This blog has also witnessed the rise and decline of social media. From a bright shiny new thing promising deeper connections for humanity to today’s extractive and weaponized cesspool (though I must admit Twitter was the place to be yesterday), only to end up back where we started with the blog. I’ll be encamped here on my little plot of digital turf, eagerly awaiting a full reboot of the blogosphere.
The technical journey here began on Movable Type, moved to WordPress, occupying the servers of a couple different hosters along the way.
Thanks to everyone along the way who read, laughed, shared, commented, debated, inspired, challenged, and helped keep this blog up and running.
Over the coming months, I plan to look back a year at a time and see how my writing evolved, see what holds up and what doesn’t, and hopefully use that introspection to improve the output going forward. I’ll try to keep the victory laps to a minimum, but also confront the big whiffs.
As this blog embarks on its next twenty years, the descriptor remains: “I write infrequent, self-referential, overly parenthetical and verbose posts mostly for my own amusement.”