I've always had a pretty low opinion of the Search Engine Optimization industry. Though there are of course legitimate experts in the field, it seems chock full of people who are barely above spammers, and they taint the image of the whole group.

That being said, I do watch what they do from time to time, especially as they've become enchanted with the power of blogs, both from a comment-spamming perspective as well as their evny of bloggers' PageRank.

But they've been doing something interesting of late that I'm actually curious about. An affiliate network called DarkBlue and a forum called Search Guild have started SEO Challenge, a contest to see who is the first Google result for the (previously unlinked) phrase Nigritude Ultramarine. Everyone from link spammers to legitimate optimizers has popped up to enter the contest, displaying the requisite contest entry image (see below) and crossing their fingers.

I suspect, though, that those of us who've made content even when there weren't bribes involved have an advantage. For all the back-and-forth about how Google is or isn't evil, the end result of PageRank is that it's a hell of a lot more work to fake your way into being a top result than it is to just have high ranking as a fringe benefit of just being a person who loves writing. That's a good thing.

So, in order to prove that real content trumps all the shady optimization tricks that someone can figure out, and because I figure I deserve an iPod at least as much as the Star Wars Kid, I'm entering the contest. Do me a favor: Link to this post with the phrase Nigritude Ultramarine. I'd rather see a real blog win than any of the fake sites that show up on that search result right now.

The conventional wisdom with a lot of the software industry is that Microsoft can just bundle any reasonably decent application into the Office suite, even if it's not the best in its category, and it will have the same effect that bundling an application into Windows has: market dominance.

I was flipping through a pile of old CDs that I have around, though, and there's a lot of evidence that Office isn't nearly as effective a tool for domination through bundling. Anybody other than me remember Microsoft Vizact? What about PhotoDraw? (PhotoDraw actually made to a version 2.0) How 'bout the Office Photo Editor, which Dvorak so lamented? On the Mac side, FrontPage used to come with Office, but it's dead now too.

There's an even wider array of failures if you just count ancillary programs that connect to Office. Outlook Mobile Manager was discontinued, only to be replaced by Mobile Information Server, which was also discontinued.

As a developer, it's scary to see Microsoft abandon so many platforms that presumably cost them millions of dollars to develop. But as an end-user, it's a nice reassurance that there are still some balancing forces in the desktop productivity market.

There's lots of other general productivity software that's died on the vine at Microsoft, too. I used to sell Microsoft Profit, their small business accounting package that was written by Great Plains (in Visual Basic, no less!) about a decade ago as a precursor to Microsoft's acquisition of the company. Some transparently defensive product acquisitions died, such as Liquid Motion, though that's less of a surprise.

There are even failures of programs that were aimed at business users but shipped with Windows itself. Schedule + came with Windows 95 (and its precursor, Windows for Workgroups 3.11) but evaporated soon after.

Even the most ambitious bundling Microsoft has ever done, shipping the Microsoft Exchange client (later renamed Windows Messaging) with Windows 95, didn't really go anywhere, and Microsoft ended up settling for Internet Mail and News, later renamed Outlook Express, as the primary messaging client on Windows machines.

Of course, being bundled with Office never hurt an app's chances. And that's a good thing, since some of the most creative and interesting apps Microsoft has done lately, such as InfoPath and, especially, OneNote, deserve a good chance. Interestingly, those two applications are the ones that companies are mostly likely to have to buy separately from their existing Office licenses, since they're not bundled with the majority of the suites that Microsoft ships.

Do links detected in messages sent to Gmail accounts affect PageRank? Should they? Does PageRank even matter anymore?

I just found an older post I'd saved as a draft nearly a year ago, and it seems even more relevant now than it was at the time. I have some additional comments, having more perspective now, but first let me share what I wrote last year:

Another one of the simple pleasures of my job: A few weeks ago I got to enjoy what was, for me, a huge personal milestone. As is probably extraordinarily evident, I've been a geek all my life. I grew up reading magazines like Compute! and its Commodore-specific spinoff, Compute!'s Gazette, along with broader industry-related magazines like Byte. In amongst the code listings (in those days, you were as likely to see a printed copy of the source code to an application as you were to see an article reviewing an application) and product announcements were a good number of personality profiles and interviews with the people who were helping create the nascent desktop and home computing industry.

So those articles shaped my view of who could be a role model. Many times, when talking to people about the business I'm in now, I'll make parallels to bits of past computer history that I've just absorbed through reading about them as they happened. While we talk about the browser wars or the birth of Netscape as ancient history, I tend to see direct parallels to the desktop suite battles in the late 80s and early 90s, or the competition between individual applications before the suites were created. In general, I think the software market is one of those industries that's better understood by monitoring the climate than by looking out at the weather.

This made my chance to meet Dan Bricklin even more exciting. Dan invented the spreadsheet, and was responsible for the creation of VisiCalc along with Bob Frankston, who programmed it. I first met Bob a few months ago and told him how I'd grown up reading their names and had honestly never considered that I'd get to meet them. As it turned out, when I met Dan he seemed to know who I was, which left me mutely geeked out for more than a few moments.

Later, we talked more about the projects Dan's working on, like his interesting work around SMBMeta and we critiqued the Tablet PCs that a few people at the conference had. I am a believer in the Tablet PC, of course, but one of the advantages of being an elder statesman in an industry is that you can point at any new device and find its strengths and weaknesses. It's the kind of perspective I'm hoping to have myself, some day.