Google did NOT âoeimmediatelyâ prove its superiority. In fact it was inferior in particularly significant ways.

As an example, searching for the phrase âoeto be or not to beâ would yield no results with Google (or garbage results), whereas AltaVista understood the query fine. This is because Google was cutting corners and throwing away short words.

AltaVista ultimately killed itself. I remember an internal email thread that made this defeat well understood to most of us. Someone asked if it was intentional that we were serving pop-under ads on the front page of the site (pop-under ads were where a popup window would be created and immediately be moved into the background.. you typically saw this on seedy porn sites). The short answer came back âoeyesâ, and it was almost universally interpreted (from my experience at least) as the most clear sign that weâ(TM)d lost.

AltaVista kept making the front page more and more complicated. Google kept its front page empty simple and clean. That was the only way that Googleâ(TM)s engine was superior at that time.

We've learned the hard way (Gordon Bell at DEC once gave GaAs semiconductors as an example) that if the US Government funds research and doesn't have a plan for American companies to commercialize it, foreign companies will take the free research and commercialize it to their advantage and American companies' disadvantage. If it is commercially useful, either have a plan to use it, or don't fund it. (Of course there is other research which is nowhere near commercially useful, and that's another story.) As a counter example, the shift from Ge semiconductors to Si semiconductors was caused by the US Government wanting to actually buy a very large number of Si transistors for use in missile guidance systems due to Si's better performance at high temperatures.

I spoke with those people too, and at first they were going to lend me a prototype, but after stalling two weeks, they flipped around entirely and wanted me to pay $1000 for the prototype. I'm glad I didn't buy it, but I'm still really curious about it. What's it like? What did you end up doing with it?

Since it's open source, how long do we have until it forks? :-)

Someone call Albert Brooks' mother!

Last year, the feature shutoff was that the older version would no longer be able to download quotes. Since this is the feature I use most, and my version was five years old, I "upgraded". Since then, I have become an expert at restoring from backup. For five years, I _never_ restored from backup, now I do it at least once a month, because Quicken regularly corrupts my data. Tech support? The guy in India was willing to charge me $20 or some such fee to walk me through the "restore from backup" procedure, but since I'd already done that several times, it wasn't necessary. He was unwilling to admit that maybe a financial product should never corrupt data, even if the file was big.