It’s almost like finding out that a mostly forgotten ex-girlfriend has a terminal disease. You wonder how someone who was, at least briefly, so central to your life disappeared so completely from your consciousness. And, you know you ought to feel at least a little bad, but instead, you feel more nostalgia than anything else — remembering the other people and places from that time.
AltaVista is going to be discontinued on July 8, 2013. AltaVista failed because it latched on to the “web portal” business model fad. This created an opening for Google that has allowed it to rise to the world dominating company it has become. The web portal model was a notion that one page should be what a web user opened up to all the time and used to get to everything else. E-mail, stocks, news, shopping, ads, and, if you could find it, maybe a search engine. When AltaVista offered its gummed up mess of a website instead of a simple, quick loading web page for searching; it became less usable. Google arrived on the scene at the same time, offered an extremely lean search page, and the rest is history. Seems like AltaVista later tried to offer a stripped down search site called “Raging,” but it didn’t catch on and by then it was too late.
So, sometimes honoring consumer preferences ends up being a better business practice than going along with the common wisdom of the business community at the time. Keeping in mind the general theme of this blog, lawmakers might keep that in mind when the business community is advocating for a policy that doesn’t seem to square with common sense or constituent preferences.
She must have been living in a locked-down dementia ward. I thought she had died years ago.