Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Map Of Our Past
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2005 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
When I last saw Eric, we had a wide-ranging conversation. We talked about flatmates, and music (what with being at the TMBG show), and our careers, and the shape of the tech industry. We laughed at the dominance of Goohoo (Google + Yahoo) in sucking available tech talent away from other companies and academe.
I playfully supposed an EU/Airbus-style consortium of minor and obsolete search engines, trying to topple Goohoo's dominance. "I can just imagine Inktomi, Altavista, Excite, Hotbot, AskJeeves, Go, and Northern Light getting together," I said.
Eric said, "It's kind of scary that you can just reel them off like that."
