History just keeps on repeating.

I worked as a software engineer for Digital Equipment Corporation (RIP) in 1996.

The research team had recently created the AltaVista search site, and the company was trying to figure out how to capitalise on it. So we developed Personal Alta Vista: a windows application that indexed all of the files and e-mail on your local hard drive.

We thought it was great - we had come up with a tool that was going to transform the way that people worked on their desktop. It was a simple and elegant dialog where you typed your query in a text box, hit "Find" and saw your results as a sortable list that looked and acted just like file-lists in Windows Explorer.

Then marketing stepped in. They made us remove the windows UI and make the whole front end work via a web browser. The online community that had already downloaded the trial application were up in arms about how we could handicap something that they had already started depending on. And the product never took off.

It went through various transformations over the next few years - the name became "AltaVista Discovery", it became a toolbar within the browser, and the project was eventually canned. And there was always a lingering frustration among the team that it was a crappy implementation of something that could be great, if only the company's strategy was to produce a great desktop product.