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When we was fab IT'S THAT TIME of year. All the Christmas and Hanukkah gifts are unwrapped and scattered around the house -- time to sit down and write thank you notes to the people, technologies, and innovative products that have given us much to be thankful for during this difficult year of 2001.
Thanks to the wonderful world of wireless, and particularly to 802.11x (aka Wi-Fi), which lets me roam from office to airport to Starbucks and all points between. Microsoft's Wi-Fi support in Windows XP and the Pocket PC is not quite plug-and-play, but it positions 802.11 as a power broker between the broadband carriers of the last mile and Bluetooth's last foot. I love my BlackBerry, but I'm going to love my Pocket PC more when 802.11 is built-out and built-in. Thanks to the peer-to-peer players: Ray Ozzie, Bill Joy and the Jxta team, and others. Groove's peer services are driving innovation in the Office suite, which will morph all the more quickly into HailStorm services. I'm hoping Jxta -- with SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) support -- will underpin the Liberty Alliance project, adding to the momentum building around Nokia's mobile architecture initiative. Thanks to Tim O'Reilly, of O'Reilly and Associates. Tim has helped keep the flame alive during challenging times for the open-source and peer-to-peer communities, shining much-needed light on issues of privacy, patents, and politics. But he's also kept an open mind and provided an open forum for less politically correct perspectives, most notably those of Ximian's Miguel de Icaza and his open-source .Net Mono project and HailStorm's architect Mark Lucovsky. Thanks to Mark Lucovsky, David Stutz, and Andrew Layman of Microsoft, not only for their aggressive support of XML as the underlying driver behind Redmond's Web services strategy, but just as much for their willingness to participate in open dialogue in conferences, standards bodies, discussion lists, and detailed interviews. Thanks to Dave Winer for championing the independent developer. As the co-author of XML-RPC (XML-Remote Procedure Call) and SOAP, Winer hurled the digital equivalent of Kubrick's jawbone into cyberspace, challenging what Winer calls "bigcos" and "smallcos" alike to play by a common sense set of rules. As the creator of UserLand Software's Manila, Frontier, and Radio content management and Weblog server and development tools, Dave (with Blogger creator Evan Williams, among others) triggered a Weblog counterculture that is changing the rules of journalism. Thanks to Adam Bosworth, whom Dave Winer credits with opening his eyes to XML in the first place. Adam led the XML revolution at Microsoft, as documented in David Bank's excellent book Breaking Windows: How Bill Gates Fumbled the Future of Microsoft. I'm not sure Gates fumbled anything, but he had a hard time handling Bosworth, who negotiated a hands-off commitment from Gates to develop what turned out to be XML Web services. Adam's XML crusade was a double-edged sword inside Microsoft. He approached Oracle and IBM to get them on the XML bandwagon and then used their support as a wedge to get Gates to commit to the strategy. But Bosworth soon grew restless, leaving Microsoft to start CrossGain with 30 Microsoft developers and Gates' principal developer evangelist Tod Neilsen. A year later, with noncompete clauses expired, J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) leader BEA acquired CrossGain and Adam's deep-rooted Web services knowledge. Thanks, BEA. Thanks to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and companies such as SonicBlue which endeavor to retain our existing rights of personal use of data. With recent court rulings restricting hyperlinks to "illegal" content, a host of innovations in Weblogs, p-to-p technologies, and virtual collaboration is threatened. SonicBlue's Replay 4000 is a harbinger of a Weblog-like platform for peer networks -- narrowcast channels of education, code, services, and timely information. Remember, it's the entertainment channels that are financing most of the attacks on the Napsteresque bearers of these messages. And thanks to George Harrison, who brought to us the simple message of the power of collaboration. With John, Paul, and Ringo, he created a platform for freedom of expression. By opening his music and mind to the East, he invented world music for a Western culture devoted to the classics or rebelling from them. In the final days of the Beatles, he integrated the Moog synthesizer and launched the digital age of MIDI sequencing and home recording. His Handmade Films production company and behind-the-scenes mentoring supported Monty Python, Peter Sellers, Beatles filmmaker Richard Lester, the Firesign Theatre, and a generation of comedic talent that continues -- along with Diet Coke -- to fuel programmers as they struggle to meet development deadlines. George gave us a final gift, as he met the dying light with grace and good humor. He listed the author of his final song as "RIP 2001". As he was fond of quoting Bob Dylan: "He not busy being born is busy dying." Thanks all. Steve Gillmor is the InfoWorld Test Center director. Reach him at steve_gillmor@infoworld.com.  RELATED SUBJECTS  Business NewsMORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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