CRYPTOCHAOS

Last week tr.im shutdown and hit the twitterverse from just below the surface of the Social Networking1 space like a Jellyfish sting.  This is not the first internet startup to shutdown.  There are many large and small that shutdown or are acquired and eventually whither and die of neglect.   Eric Woodward's tr.im was a popular url shortening service and one that I used on a fairly regular basis.  It had some nice features, but the "url shortening" space has become crowded with competitors of late.  Twitter, a thousand pound gorilla in the social networking space anointed one (bit.ly) the url shortener for Twitter and Eric saw this as the checkered flag in the race.

Ellison Moves Quickly to Push Aside IBM, Plunges Into Competitive Server Market - WSJ.com:

"One person familiar with the situation said IBM's final offer over the weekend was closer to the latter figure, making Oracle's $9.50 offer a financially better alternative in the view of Sun's board and more likely to close. Oracle has to pay Sun a $260 million breakup fee if it terminates the transaction.

Another person said IBM was pressing Sun's board to revoke change-of-control provisions that would give a large number of Sun executives two years of salary in the event of a sale. Yet another person familiar with the matter said Oracle didn't hesitate to accept those provisions, characterizing them as 'a rounding error' to the software giant."

I am an alumni of the first Internet Boom/Bust cycle, more specifically of Viant Corp which was originally founded with the name "Silicon Valley Internet Partners" or SVIP.    I joined SVIP from Merrill Lynch, and the shift was dramatic...   SVIP and eventually Viant was an organization of extremely bright, energetic, optimistic, creative and interesting people.  People who, to this day,  remain in touch.   There is a Viant Yahoo group where a few of us communicate and many of us lurk.   Recently there was a thread around the current events in the market and the general feeling that...

Things will get worse before they get better... The "spend more than you earn" party is over. It's going to be a massive hang-over.

A fellow former CXO responded in his characteristically upbeat , poetic and humorous style.  I enjoyed it so much that I've included it below....

True, but I am old.

In junior high school, Comet Kohoutek was predicted by some to wipe out the entire Earth. True, this was mostly predicted by people in California and,true again, most Americans were stoned out of their gourd during that time period...so that prediction doesn't really count.

But when I was in high school we all learned the metric system because "the rest of the world uses it and by 1980 America will too!". Well, that didn't happen.

A little later, Time magazine ran a cover story on "The Second Ice Age" which was fast approaching upon us and would have Americans moving to Mexico in droves so they wouldn't freeze to death! (Seriously, look it up, it was the late 70's.) Now we are warming globally, it seems, and Ohio will soon have beachfront property.

Let's see, what else? Communism was on the doorstep of taking over the world and we would all be calling each other comrade by the turn of the century. A wall came down instead.

Here's my favorite: Y2K. Remember that one, folks? People were preparing for the end of the world (again) and I think the only thing that happened was that one toaster in Australia malfunctioned or something.

I'm not saying that this isn't a real crisis or that there won't be real pain and suffering as a result of this. There probably will be.

I'm just skeptical.

Optimists vastly outperform pessimists.

I know that's true because a consulting company proved it to me with a 3X3 matrix and a very thick presentation binder that made a loud "thud" when they dropped it on my desk next to their Y2K report.

-Bill 

Thank for sharing Bill!

A few years ago I worked at an incubator called 12 Entrepreneuring. It was during the heady but waning days of the internet boom. 12 was in the midst of incubating Grand Central Networks, an integration network company. I was asked to help temporarily with the conceptual design and architecture on the project, which was based in the San Francisco office, until the New York office (my eventual homebase) was up and running.

My background was in systems integration at the enterprise level. I felt that the value of the network would be to provide a rich set of pre-integrated business partners and industry aware components. My point was to align with the business and not be purely technology focused. Founder Halsey Minor pushed to keep the service simple. His catch phrase was "a better FTP". Alas, Grand Central Networks has gone the way of many a startup.

Alignment with business is where the industry is finally heading... In an effort to differentiate themselves in the inevitable arms race like spiral of the integration market, webMethods has sought and received SWIFT Certification. Banks looking to upgrade their SWIFT integration technology now have a reason to seriously consider webMethods. iWay Software, as the adapter company has been at the forefront of supporting industry protocols such as SWIFT, FIX, HIPAA, etc. and is pushing into insurance with ACORD. Yes, vendors will continue to add bells and whistles to their products but I expect them to become more tightly aligned with various industries and their standards. A tool that is already aware of your industry's standard processes and vocabulary is incredibly valuable.