8 Can't Miss Predictions... for 1998

alphadogg-nw writes "Tired of being wrong too often, a Network World pundit applies 20-20 hindsight to this list of prognostications for 1998, which if he's right will turn out to be quite a year. Among the forecasts: The U.S. Department of Justice will go medieval on Microsoft, Compaq will buy what's left of DEC, AOL likewise Netscape, Apple will introduce something said to look like an Easter egg ... and then there's the deafening buzz about this new search engine called Google."

Comments

Altavista

[hey!]

Y'know, I liked Altavista a great deal. It was a rare case of a great product getting its block knocked off by an even better one. Still, for some time I found Altavista's more bells-and-whistley approach useful for triangulatin Google results, at least until Google engineers seemingly perfected their MROIPP (Mind Reading Over Internet Protocols Protocol) technology.

Re:Altavista

[Vellmont]

Y'know, I liked Altavista a great deal. It was a rare case of a great product getting its block knocked off by an even better one.

I liked Altavista too, and had a similar reaction about it being better than Google until about 2000.

The only quibble I have is that AltaVista died because they started thinking they were a portal like Yahoo, and not a search engine. They didn't figure out targeted ads, turned their site into a Yahoo clone, and did a "me too!" with email. If they'd done what Google did, focus on the search technology, give away better email than Yahoo was giving away at the time, and stop trying to beat Yahoo at being Yahoo, I think Google would still mean "a really big number".