Tuesday, July 24, 2007

a quick look back

i stumbled across this little piece of article that i wrote some 12 years ago on some student newspaper (while in college). funny to realise the world has evolved so much since then.

to give you a better perspective, 1995 was the time when windows 95 was just released, and ie is still in version 2, which barely allowed sounds to be embedded onto websites. that was the time when netscape's still alive, just had its historic ipo (the event for which thomas friedman named as one of the world's flatteners in his book later) and for the first time, has acrobat/pdf plug-in available in its latest version. that was the time when people were still exploring how this new programming language called java's going to do to this world, and there were dreams of web-based, "disposable" softwares. that was the time when amazon just started its online book store business and e-commerce was considered an innovative concept.

today, windows is in its fourth consumer version after 95 (and still as buggy as ever) - 98, me, xp and vista; ie became the lone survivor in the browser war (unless you still count firefox in). netscape is nowhere to be found - so is aol who bought netscape for $4.2b in 1998; java has become an enterprise programming language of choice, contrary to what people first thought; online shopping has become a norm for business and consumer worldwide - it has passed mail order in overall sales last year already; and finally the concept of "disposable" software has gone mainstream with google, salesforce.com, saas (software as a service) concept and alike.

oh wow. only when we slowly looked back do we realise we have gone so far, and how stupid my writing was. ha ha.

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