Consider the telephone answering machine. It began as a bulky analogue box running spools of tape. It turned into a small digital box, often incorporated into a phone. And finally it disappeared altogether, turning into pure software running out somewhere on a phone company’s network. Once you bought an answering machine. Now you buy an answering service.

And so it goes. Software kills hardware. We give it a fancy name – “virtualization” – but it’s just a matter of programming a computer to do what used to require a separate appliance. And as the computer gets more powerful, more and more appliances get sucked into its software.

In a post on Monday, Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz noted how the people who run corporate data centers have had a love affair with special-purpose appliances: “NAS filers, load balancers, storage switches and firewalls, even custom search appliances.” The appliances “solve a specific problem, do so with great focus, and are like novacaine on a technical problem. Have a pain? Numb it with an appliance.” But there’s a high price. The proliferation of specialized gear quickly becomes an economic and operational burden: “Leaving high price tags aside, specialized products typically require specialized skills, customized management or versioning processes, and they tend to be difficult to integrate into increasingly uniform datacenter processes.”

Fortunately, all that stuff is going the way of the answering machine. The functions are being programmed into computers, which not only saves money but also increases flexibility. Software’s a hell of a lot more malleable than hardware. Schwartz quotes one forward-thinking customer who says that “general purpose [computers] are so fast, we do pretty much everything in software.”

Where does it end? I was talking recently with Bryan Doerr, the chief technology officer of the hosting company SAVVIS and a guy who’s thought a lot about the implications of virtualization. He suggested that eventually we’re likely see the arrival of what he calls “the virtual data center.” You’ll be able, in essence, to encapsulate in software the configuration of an entire corporate data center. Need to set up a new center? Just run the program.

And, of course, once the data center turns into software, you can automate its operation and management. And you can set it up wherever you want – on your own computer or on somebody else’s. In the end, it probably just gets sucked into the network. Like the answering machine.

Software kills hardware. Think about it.

Richard MacManus continues to chronicle the angry response of the Netscape faithful to Jason Calacanis’s reworking of the venerable portal’s home page into a Digg-style participative news aggregation thingy. He compares it to the disastrous introduction of New Coke some 20 years ago. “It certainly looks like the people have spoken,” writes MacManus. “And they’re not happy. Will the new Netscape go the way of the New Coke? Or will Calacanis and crew get over this hurdle and convince a good portion of those 12 million users to stick around? Judging by the comments on my previous post, many of them seem to be already migrating to MSN and Yahoo.”

Now, it may well be that all those pissed-off Netscape customers are just going through a crankypants phase and soon they’ll come to understand that, though they never realized it before, they’ve always really wanted to vote for news stories rather than just read them. “Hey, honey, look at this – you can vote for news stories! Ain’t that Internet something!” They’ll “get it,” in other words, and all will be happy again in Web 2.0 land. But I doubt it. I mean, let’s face it: Only a small, select slice of the population is likely to dig Digg. Most people have better things to do. And I have a sneaky suspicion that the same goes for most other examples of participative media, from blogs to tags to wikis to whatever. They’re niche-y. Now, there’s no shame in that. You can build great businesses with niche products – as long as you don’t start overreaching.

In the end, we may come to see the Netscape debacle as a seminal moment for Web 2.0, or at least the participative media side of Web 2.0. To put it into Geoffrey Moore’s terms, the remaking of Netscape seems like the first real attempt to take Web 2.0 across the chasm, from the little land of enthusiasts and early adopters to the big world of the pragmatic mainstream. The risk in trying to cross the chasm, of course, is that if you don’t make it, it’s ugly.

A few days ago, Dell quietly launched a corporate blog, called one2one. Mixing words and video, it’s designed to let various Dell employees talk about Dell products and services – and to share their enthusiasm for the company with customers. “Like every corporate blog it is looking for a voice and will probably take time to find one,” writes Andy Lark. “It’s a little corporatey – but then it’s a corporate blog.”

Of course, Dell’s effort has already been trashed by such self-styled guardians of blog orthodoxy as Jeff Jarvis and Steve Rubel. “Ho ho ho,” writes Jarvis, who’s made a career of whining about problems he’s had with Dell. “It’s a blog in content management system name only … Dell continues to believe that it can control the conversation. That horse is out of the barn, over the horizon, dead, and buried.” Rubel is even more smug: “Dell really failed to get the blog going the way that they could have. This was a golden opportunity for the company … Perhaps it might have been better for them to have stayed silent. Cmon Dell. We know you’re bigger than this. Join us. Be real.”

What windbaggery. Join us? Who’s “us”?

For most companies, a corporate blog probably won’t be worth the trouble (as I’ve suggested before). But companies considering the launch of a blog should take a good look at what Dell’s doing, as the company is at least thinking clearly about the role its blog plays in its broader corporate communications program. By providing a way for employees to talk directly to and, through comments, with customers, the one2one blog fits thematically with the company’s core strategy of selling “direct” to customers. The message it sends reinforces a bigger message.

The blog also dovetails with Dell’s current effort to reinvigorate its customer service, which has been plagued by problems in recent years. In this regard, the blog’s audience is as much the employee as the customer: It emphasizes, and symbolizes, that a company’s reputation is built on its direct, one-to-one interactions with individual customers – something employees of big companies all too easily lose sight of.

A corporate blog shouldn’t exist in isolation; it should be part of a broader strategy, as Dell’s is.

At a more tactical level, Dell has come up with a thoughtful set of policies – which it terms a “doctrine” – governing its blog. It lays out clear “rules of engagement” for readers: “You are encouraged to speak in an honest, informal voice and to foster productive, candid dialogue that can help us learn from each other. We’ll listen, as well as post, and ensure we engage in two-way conversations … [But] civil dialogue is expected from all those involved in the blog conversations. We’ll not post any comments if they are spam, inappropriate, use profanity or are defamatory in any way.” The doctrine also makes explicit Dell’s approach to blogging, carefully setting expectations by announcing the principles that will guide what’s posted and what isn’t. Here’s an excerpt:

Think straight, talk straight. We will think before we post and strive to have good judgment in all blog interactions. We will not hesitate to take on tough, escalating issues, but we will do so in a measured, thoughtful fashion. Sometimes that takes a little more time.

Sometimes we may be quiet. There are some topics we just can’t discuss on one2one – just as we don’t in other communication channels. Posting on political issues, sensitive financial matters and topics unrelated to our business or industry, for example, will likely not occur.

Our corporate values and policies will guide what we say. As per our company’s Code of Conduct, we are committed to acting in a professional and ethical manner in all situations – whether it is with our business partners, our neighbors or customers. one2one is no exception.

Taking time to think? Being quiet sometimes? Following corporate policies? These kinds of level-headed rules will earn a company the ridicule of the blogosphere’s true believers. But who cares? For a company, a blog is a tool, not an ideology.

UPDATE: On the Dell blog, Lionel Menchaca responds, perfectly, to the blogosphere’s hyperventilating. The response brings, predictably, an even more shrill and self-involved post from Jeff Jarvis.

We’re entering the third age of IT. The first age was the Mainframe Age. It had the advantage of being highly efficient, with computing assets operating at 90 percent or more of their capacity. But it had the disadvantage of being impersonal. Individuals couldn’t apply computing to their personal tasks when they had to go through a batch-processing regime. The second age – the age we’re still largely in – was the Client-Server Age. It had the advantage of making computing personal. We all got our own computers, along with easy access to the information and applications stored in our company’s data center. But it had the disadvantage of being incredibly inefficient (and inflexible). With thousands and thousands of subscale data centers scattered across the earth, capacity utilization plummeted – often to 25% or less.

The third age, now dawning, is the Utility Age. It offers the best of both worlds – personalization and efficiency. Today’s scattered IT infrastructure will be consolidated into highly efficient, utility-class data plants, while individuals will gain new flexibility to meld systems to their desires through simple configuration tools. For end users, IT will disappear. What they’ll get is the functionality they want. The same thing happened with mechanical power a century ago. Many thousands of scattered, subscale generators were consolidated into massive and massively efficient power plants, and the users got a flood of new applications.

Two good new articles examine some of the possible implications of IT’s third age: At Baseline, David Carr pulls together lots of facts from lots of places to give one of the better descriptions of Google’s utility infrastructure and the clever ways the company deploys applications on it. And, at O’Reilly Radar, Tim O’Reilly interviews Microsoft’s Debra Chrapaty, Vice President of Operations for Windows Live, about the deployment of applications on Microsoft’s emerging utility infrastructure – and uses her comments as a springboard for some more general musings about the future.

We’re in the early stage of the creation of the IT utility, so it’s interesting to see how a couple of the giants are approaching the task.

Speaking of crowds and their mindlessness, here’s an excerpt from an interesting interview, in the Boston Globe, in which Jaron Lanier discusses his recent and controversial essay “Digital Maoism”:

Globe: You’re contesting the idea of ”wise” crowds and the notion that genuine intelligence can somehow emerge from ”dumb” processes like those in a network, or a swarm.

Lanier: I reject the word ”wisdom” with regard to crowds. A crowd is not good with ideas. A crowd is absolutely inarticulate, vulnerable to going crazy. A crowd is actually idiotic. It’s a statistical accountant, a calculating device, a certain type of thermometer or barometer. You can use a crowd as a scientific instrument.

Globe: You worry that individuals are losing ground to such instruments?

Lanier: Yes. It’s almost a postmodern form of suicide. The motivations are easy to understand. There’s death denial. People die but computers and crowds, maybe, don’t. And there’s liability avoidance. As an individual, you have to be responsible. As a member of a crowd – or a user of information systems – you’re not responsible anymore.

What a disappointing species we are. Stick us in a virgin paradise, and we create great honeycombed bureaucracies, vast bramble-fields of rules and regulations, ornate politburos filled with policymaking politicos, and, above all, tangled webs of power. Freed from history, freed from distance, freed even from our own miserable bodies, we just dig deeper holes in the mire. We fall short of our own expectations.

Witness Wikipedia. For some of us, the popular online encyclopedia has become more interesting as an experiment in emergent bureaucracy than in emergent content. Slashdot today points to Dirk Riehle’s fascinating interview with three high-ranking Wikipedians, Angela Beesley, Elisabeth “Elian” Bauer, and Kizu Naoko. They describe Wikipedia’s increasingly complex governance structure, from its proliferation of hierarchical roles to its “career paths” to its regulatory committees and processes to its arcane content templates. We learn that working the bureaucracy tends to become its own reward for the most dedicated Wikipedians: “Creating fewer articles as time goes on seems fairly common as people get caught up in the politics and discussion rather than the editing.” And we learn that the rules governing the deletion of an entry now take up “37 pages plus 20 subcategories.” For anyone who still thinks of Wikipedia as a decentralized populist collective, the interview will be particularly enlightening. Wikipedia is beginning to look something like a post-revolutionary Bolshevik Soviet, with an inscrutable central power structure wielding control over a legion of workers.

It will be interesting to watch how those workers respond as they confront the byzantine bureaucracy that’s running the show. Will they continue to contribute, or will they become alienated and abandon the project? As Angela Beesley remarks, “The biggest challenge [for Wikipedia] is to maintain what made us who and what we are: the traditional wiki model of being openly editable.” Kizu Naoko singles out “lack of involvement” as a major threat to the project: “we need to go back to the first and foremost challenge: To keep the openness of the wikis that makes it easy for people to join.” The fate of Wikipedia – and perhaps the general “participative” or “open source” organizational model of online production – appears to hinge on how the tension between openness and bureaucracy plays out.

There was one passage in the interview that was of particular personal interest to me. Some time ago, I proposed the Law of the Wiki: “Output quality declines as the number of contributors increases.” At the time, I was heavily criticized by leading members of the wiki community, including Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and wiki-preneur Ross Mayfield, who argued that the opposite was true – that the more contributors an entry attracts, the higher its quality becomes. So I was gratified to find my Law of the Wiki confirmed by the interviewees:

Dirk Riehle: What about the ‘collective intelligence’ or ‘collective wisdom’ argument: That given enough authors, the quality of an article will generally improve? Does this hold true for Wikipedia?

Elisabeth “Elian” Bauer: No, it does not. The best articles are typically written by a single or a few authors with expertise in the topic. In this respect, Wikipedia is not different from classical encyclopedias.

Kizu Naoko: Elian is right.

There you have it: Experts matter. And they matter more than the “community.” Indeed, “a single or a few authors with expertise” will trump the alleged wisdom of the crowd. Now, there’s something to build on.

The dynamics of Google’s unusual management structure, with power shared among cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt, have long been hidden behind Google’s corporate cloak of opacity. But a ray of light pierced the darkness today, as the Wall Street Journal’s Kevin Delaney reported on how the threesome collaborated in retrofitting the secondhand Boeing 767 that Brin and Page purchased last year. Delaney offers a first-hand report from Leslie Jennings, the designer hired to remodel the plane:

Mr. Jennings says that Messrs. Brin and Page “had some strange requests,” including hammocks hung from the ceiling of the plane. At one point he witnessed a dispute between them over whether Mr. Brin should have a “California king” size bed, he says. Mr. Jennings says Mr. Schmidt stepped in to resolve that by saying, “Sergey, you can have whatever bed you want in your room; Larry, you can have whatever kind of bed you want in your bedroom. Let’s move on.” Mr. Jennings says Mr. Schmidt at another point told him, “It’s a party airplane.”

In recent years, Google has benefited from many glowing profiles in the press highlighting its cofounders’ modest lifestyles, in particular the fact that they both drive fuel-efficient Toyota Prius hybrid cars. In a 2004 profile on the television show 20-20, Barbara Walters noted that “Larry Page and Sergey Brin are not your typical billionaires. In fact, if you type billionaire into Google, the picture that emerges — fancy cars, private jets, mansions, jewels, supermodel girlfriends — isn’t anything you’d find in the lifestyle of the Google guys. Page drives a Prius, which costs around $21,000. Brin gets around for the most part on in-line skates, and he still lives in a rented apartment.” That same year, the BBC wrote that “far from living an extravagant lifestyle, complete with yachts and private jets like fellow software leader Oracle boss Larry Ellison, Mr Page, 31, and Mr Brin, 30, are both reported to continue to live modest, unassuming lifestyles. They don’t even have sports cars, and instead are said to each drive a Toyota Prius, a plain-looking but rather environmentally friendly saloon that is half electric-powered, and growing in popularity among green-minded Americans.” Last year, Business Week reported, “Flash and ostentation cut no ice at Google … The status vehicle of choice at the Googleplex is the Toyota Prius hybrid, which both co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page drive.” Playboy, in the introduction to its famous interview with Brin and Page, wrote, “The two are unlikely billionaires. They seem uninterested in the accoutrements of wealth. Both drive Priuses, Toyota’s hybrid gas-and-electric car. It is impossible to imagine them in Brioni suits.”

The Prius can go about 55 miles on a single gallon of gas. A Boeing 767, by contrast, will burn about 7,500 gallons of fuel during a typical five-hour party flight. The size of the beds does not appear to have a measurable impact on fuel consumption.