“Technologies want to survive, and they reinvent themselves to go on.” (Paul Saffo, technology forecaster in Silicon Valley.)

Technology expert Steve Lohr, writing in yesterday’s New York Times, shares a fascinating theory centered around the fact that, contrary to popular opinion of recent years, many of yesterday’s technologies aren’t dead yet; they’re alive, kicking, and often still turning a profit for their respective manufacturers.

To prove this theory, Lohr explores the state of the mainframe, I.B.M.’s classic contribution to technological hardware. The company released a new version of the mainframe last month; remarkable, given that the equipment was famously predicted to be put out of its misery by 1996. The author then uses this example to shed light on history’s other obsolete technologies that just never went away.

Today, mainframe sales are a tiny fraction of the personal computer market. But with the mainframe facing extinction, I.B.M. retooled the technology, cut prices and revamped its strategy. A result is that mainframe technology — hardware, software and services — remains a large and lucrative business for I.B.M., and mainframes are still the back-office engines behind the world’s financial markets and much of global commerce.

The mainframe stands as a telling case in the larger story of survivor technologies and markets. The demise of the old technology is confidently predicted, and indeed it may lose ground to the insurgent, as mainframes did to the personal computer. But the old technology or business often finds a sustainable, profitable life. Television, for example, was supposed to kill radio, and movies, for that matter. Cars, trucks and planes spelled the death of railways. A current death-knell forecast is that the Web will kill print media.

What are the common traits of survivor technologies? First, it seems, there is a core technology requirement: there must be some enduring advantage in the old technology that is not entirely supplanted by the new. But beyond that, it is the business decisions that matter most: investing to retool the traditional technology, adopting a new business model and nurturing a support network of loyal customers, industry partners and skilled workers.

The unfulfilled predictions of demise, experts say, tend to overestimate the importance of pure technical innovation and underestimate the role of business judgment. “The rise and fall of technologies is mainly about business and not technological determinism,” said Richard S. Tedlow, a business historian at the Harvard Business School.

To survive, technologies must evolve, much as animal species do in nature. Indeed, John Steele Gordon, a business historian and author, observes that there are striking similarities in the evolutionary process of markets and biological ecosystems. Dinosaurs, he notes, may be long gone, victims of a change in climate that better suited mammals. But smaller reptiles evolved and survived, and today there are more than 8,000 species of reptiles, mainly lizards and snakes, compared with about 5,400 species of mammals.

It’s a fascinating article; click here to read it in its entirety. And, as always, let us know your thoughts in the comments section.

Ask a dozen tech pundits to describe Web 2.0 and you’re likely to get two dozen explanations as to what it is. The precise definition remains open to debate — and in some ways, that’s exactly the point.

So begins “What Is Web 2.0?,” a recent article by BNET’s Mike Wolcott that attempts to attempts to create a clear definition, history, and set of user guidelines to the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

The story argues that Web 2.0 isn’t a fad, nor is it just a recent development. It’s actually the culmination of a sort of Internet evolution that’s been ongoing since the 1980s. What’s more, it’s something that consumers and companies alike would be wise to try to understand now, at this relatively early stage.

… Web 2.0 describes a set of next-generation Internet technologies. These protocols and tools make it easier to create online applications that behave dynamically, much like traditional PC-based software. They’re also highly social, encouraging users to manipulate and interact with content in new ways. Web 2.0 pushes computing power off the desktop and onto the Internet, which means less time and money spent on PC software administration. As a general rule, Web 2.0 tools are also less expensive than traditional software — and many are even free. Because they’re Web-based, all you need to get started is an up-to-date browser.

… In general, the key characteristics of Web 2.0 are:

* Web-based applications can be accessed from anywhere
* Simple applications solve specific problems
* Value lies in content, not the software used to display content
* Data can be readily shared
* Distribution is bottom-up, not top-down
* Employees and customers can access and use tools on their own
* Social tools encourage people to create, collaborate, edit, categorize, exchange, and promote information
* Network effects are encouraged; the more people who contribute, the better the content gets

All of this has major implications for the future of information technology and personal communications. Web 2.0 creates new ways for large groups of people to collaborate and exchange information while reducing the importance of the PC itself as an information-delivery platform. When both the applications and the data that feed into them reside online, a variety of devices can function as information terminals: your smart phone, your music player, the computer you use today, and whatever computer you’ll use next year. Web 2.0 not only makes all this possible, it also makes it inexpensive and easy to deploy.

Read the entire story here.

As part of his goal to sell 10 million iPhones in 2008, Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently announced a reworking of the popular consumer product to make it compatible with business email programs. This is being done by the introduction of a software development kit that allows users to write additional programs — an essential element if the device is to be integrated into corporate IT departments.

From Bloomberg News:

Starting in June, Apple will push corporate e-mails to the phone, support Microsoft Corp.’s Exchange message system and offer new security functions. Apple also released software that lets outsiders write applications for the phone, and funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers for iPhone-based startups.

The intention is to entice corporations to provide their work force with iPhones (as opposed to the BlackBerry, which is the current corporate phone of choice). This had not been a realistic goal prior to last week’s introduction of the software development kit, which is intended to resolve compatibility issues.

And if those issues will indeed be resolved by the kit, will corporations then start buying up iPhones for their employees to use? Opinions are mixed, with many commentators citing Apple’s historic refusal to reveal basic information to outsiders as a huge roadblock in the company’s quest to win over corporate America’s various IT departments.

Writes the InternetNews.com’s Andy Patrizio:

A developer of enterprise mobility software has expressed doubts that Apple’s iPhone can cut it in the enterprise due to a number of issues, all of which Apple can change, but in doing so are anathema to how the company operates.

Ahmed Datoo, vice president of marketing of Zenprise, a developer of software for enterprise BlackBerry users, said he would welcome the opportunity to support the iPhone in the enterprise but has his doubts it will make much headway.

“The question that needs to be asked is, is the 2.0 software going to be good enough to take on RIM at the enterprise level?” he told InternetNews.com. “It doesn’t look it. Is it good enough to get at the small and medium-sized business market? Probably. They have different requirements.”

Reservations aside, there’s no doubt that Mr. Jobs will dive into this new arena of competition with his usual zeal — he’s already begun waging war against BlackBerry. Again, from Bloomberg:

At an event at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California, to show off the features, Jobs took a jab at Research In Motion by chiding the Canadian company’s security.

All BlackBerry e-mails in North America go through Research In Motion computers in its Network Operations Center in Waterloo, Ontario. A failure in one system a few weeks ago caused an outage across the continent.

“Every e-mail message that’s sent to a RIM device or from a RIM device goes through a NOC up in Canada,” Jobs, 53, said. “That provides a single point of failure but also provides a very interesting security situation.”

Last week, the New York Times reported on the growing tendency of Web companies to catalog customers’ every move. This phenomenon, in which advertisers gather as much info as they can about customers, is nothing new, and historically goes hand-in-hand with the very basics of advertising itself.

But what is new is the expanded capabilities to track behavior patterns available only on the Internet. And, as the lion’s share of American commerce continues to shift online and away from traditional brick-and-mortar settings, there’s a strong demand for such information. Companies compiling such statistics are finding themselves in possession of an asset that’s more and more valuable in today’s increasingly competitive consumer economy.

Privacy advocates are speaking out against these actions, using the argument that consumers aren’t being made aware that their behavior is being tracked. But then again, companies aren’t legally required to share such information.

From Louise Story’s March 10 article:

The Web companies are, in effect, taking the trail of crumbs people leave behind as they move around the Internet, and then analyzing them to anticipate people’s next steps. So anybody who searches for information on such disparate topics as iron supplements, airlines, hotels and soft drinks may see ads for those products and services later on.

Consumers have not complained to any great extent about data collection online. But privacy experts say that is because the collection is invisible to them. Unlike Facebook’s Beacon program, which stirred controversy last year when it broadcast its members’ purchases to their online friends, most companies do not flash a notice on the screen when they collect data about visitors to their sites.

“When you start to get into the details, it’s scarier than you might suspect,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group. “We’re recording preferences, hopes, worries and fears.”

But executives from the largest Web companies say that privacy fears are misplaced, and that they have policies in place to protect consumers’ names and other personal information from advertisers. Moreover, they say, the data is a boon to consumers, because it makes the ads they see more relevant.

Perhaps most noteworthy is the fact that this is no fringe movement. Big players such as Microsfot and Yahoo are taking a very strong interest in the findings of these consumer-tracking groups.

Web companies once could monitor the actions of consumers only on their own sites. But over the last couple of years, the Internet giants have spread their reach by acting as intermediaries that place ads on thousands of Web sites, and now can follow people’s activities on far more sites.

Large Web companies like Microsoft and Yahoo have also acquired a number of companies in the last year that have rich consumer data. …

Web companies also can collect more data as people spend more time online. The number of searches that American Web users enter each month has nearly doubled since summer of 2006, to 14.6 billion searches in January, according to comScore. …

Even with all the data Web companies have, they are finding ways to obtain more. The giant Internet portals have been buying ad-delivery companies like DoubleClick and Atlas, which have stockpiles of information. Atlas, for example, delivers 6 billion ads every day. The comScore figures do not capture such data.

Executives from Web companies said they had been working to inform consumers on their data practices.

These companies noted their consumer-protection policies. AOL, for example, lets users opt out of some ad targeting, Google lets users edit the search histories that are linked to their user names, Yahoo is working on a policy to obscure people’s computer identification addresses that are connected to search results, and Microsoft says it does not link any of its visitors’ behavior to their user names, even if those people are registered.

A study of California adults last year found that 85 percent thought sites should not be allowed to track their behavior around the Web to show them ads, according to the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at the University of California at Berkeley, which conducted the study.

So what do you think? Is this part of the natural course of the market, in which companies have to use every card available to them to court consumers? Or does it represent a new and possibly dangerous breach into the privacy of Internet users? Whatever your feelings, the general consensus is that this is a gray area that will likely continue to generate controversy as these policies escalate (which they are certain to do).

The final act of one of the decade’s biggest business stories unfolded yesterday in Brussels, Belgium. The European Commission (the regulatory arm of the European Union) officially and unconditionally approved Google’s $3.1 billion acquisition of New York-based DoubleClick, an Internet advertising corporation that specializes in “ad serving” (a method of delivering targeted ads to specific customers and demographics).

There was some speculation within the industry that the EU would not approve the merger, since it represented such a huge consolidation in the world of online commerce. Rivals cried “monopoly” and privacy groups objected to the combination of two large companies known for their effective information-gathering techniques.

However, those objections were not considered significant enough for the EU to block the merger. “The European Commission’s statement sought to play down the concerns, saying the deal was unlikely to have harmful effects on consumers, at least in the markets it considered,” wrote David Lawsky for Reuters news service. The EU also ruled that “the companies operate in different parts of the online advertising world and their deal was not a marriage of rivals,” according to the same story.

Upon its approval Tuesday, Google immediately finalized the purchase and took over management of Doubleclick.

Click here to read the Reuters article.