Two days ago, I wrote up a blog about the 20th anniversary of the IBM PC, which — to me — really kicked off the PC revolution.

You can disagree (fine…), but that was my thought.

One issue that I wanted to get to that day — but did not — was a different reflection, beyond what the release of the IBM PC meant to the computing world/world in general.

Basically, it was more of a look back at what has changed on a more recent timeline.

I touched on this a bit, when I mentioned that the same thing that happened to the PC is now happening to the Web (going more business — REAL business — oriented).

I guess I wanted to just capture what has been lost and what is in danger of being lost (for better or worse, mind you).

Because the world — and the World Wide Web — is constantly changing. Sometimes for the worst, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the … I just don’t know.

But it changes.

Here are some, I guess, reflections:

The bad/sad news:

• Remember when Webmonkey was required reading? Who goes there now? Same can be said for the hard-copy Wired magazine. And wired.com tumbled as soon as it was acquired by Lycos — at least to me.
  
• Remember when ZDNet was a great Web site for breaking news? Purchased by CNET, it still has good Ziff-Davis commentary, but dramatic cut in the number of sources for tech news — from two to one. Yes, Dan Gilmor at siliconvalley.com is still around, and there are others. But ZDNet and news.com were the big two to me. Now they are the same. Sad.
  
• Four words: suck.com word.com — The latter totally gone; the former virtually gone. Very sad.
  
• Salon.com will probably die — or become a pale shade of its current self — by year’s end. Are online subscriptions the answer? I don’t think so. (What is? Consolidation and syndication, I think. Not always good, but a sustainable business model.)
  
• Slate.com may well continue on forever, because it has Microsoft’s backing, and MS does not want to admit that it failed. Good writing — although uneven — and a perplexingly bad looking site, but it will survive unless MS pulls serious plugs. Not in the near future.
  
• Fuckedcompany.com: Required reading today; will not be shortly. There won’t be as many Webvans and Scients (just merged with iXL) and MarchFirsts soon. All will have died/morphed/endured. Then what? There will not be anything to read about.
  
• In the same company as fuckedcompany.com will be such sites as ipo.com (all about tech IPOs, of which there are few these days..) and webmergers.com. And other sites in the same vein. In Chicago, themayreport.com may survive — I still don’t know how Ron May makes money — but once this dot-com/dot-bomb churn settles down, he may be in trouble, as well.
  
• With the exception of job hunting, the online classified promise never materialized. Yes, marginally easier. Still not there. Why? Most of the efforts to turn off-line classifieds into online classifieds are driven by old-school publishers. This is not working. (See cars.com, where I worked.) More “thinking outside the box” is needed. This is part of the reason for monster.com’s success. It didn’t just organize and post classifieds, it offered tools and personalization.
  
• Portals: What can I say? They suck/they help somewhat. They are good for newbies. There is promise there, but right now — to me — it is promise unfulfilled.
  
• Jargonwatch: What industry has generated more buzzwords/phrases than the dot-com world? Yes, some of these were around prior to WWW, but here is a small sampling:
  

  • Think outside the box
    
  • Paradigm
    
  • Computer terms for non-computer use: “We’ll talk off-line [i.e. outside the meeting] about this”
    

• The death of small but interesting sites. Most are still there, but there is little incentive to go there: want to go to jodi.org and play for 15 minutes or got to cnn.com and read the news? Vast majority of the time, the latter.
  
• A lot of the “cool” of these small/experimental sites has disappeared. On the other hand, much of what they pioneered is embedded — more elegantly — in high-profile sites. The bad news is really not the death of the cool, but the death of experimentation. Because the big players won’t stick out their neck to see if “this” will work or not.
  
• Writing/editing skills are … uh … missing on most sites. This will boomerang, I predict, as the more tight-ass companies take over more and more of the Web and, thus, its content.
  

But all is not lost. Much good has come out of this, sometimes almost conflicting with the above.

The good:

• More news, all the time. cnn.com, msnbc.com, abc.com (cbsnews.com is a late-comer and, to me, inconsequential).
  
• monster.com — It did not do it all by itself, but hunting for a job has forever changed thanks to the Internet and sites like monster.com, which — to me — is a best of breed site.
  
• You can find damn near anything on the Web. It’s great. Who starred in that movie? What is the size of France? Where can I get a replacement driver for my old printer. Sometimes it takes some skilled digging, but it’s usually there.
  
• The Web has changed everything, just not to the degree that was hyped (i.e. promised). A few years ago, who would have really thought a job search could be done throught the Web ONLY (no stamps)? That the village of Smallsville would have a Web site with numbers and e-mails of all village officials? The future is here, and it’s on the Web.
  

The perplexing:

• Computers are still too damn hard to use. I’ve been saying this for years; Mitch Kapor (of Lotus 1-2-3) said the same during a celebration of the IBM PC’s 20th anniversary.
  
• The Web is still too hard to use. AOL and MSN have tried to address this through proprietary tools; I don’t know if this is the answer. But who the fuck cares what a POP3 server is? And why do I need to enter this in MS Outlook to make it work??? Valid questions.