I was devastated yesterday when I checked the rankings of one of our websites – it had slid down a couple of places  in Google in about 20 keywords.  I rushed to the search engine to find out which one of our low-life competitors had trumped us, but what I found caught me completely by surprise.

It was we who had trumped us in Google.

How? well we had a whole lot of Web 2.0 posts on the internet that had been there a while and done nothing and we commented on them – I just had all the guys and girls put comments on these posts from our account and wham! Straight to number 1. Unbelievable.

Never, never underestimate the power of Web 2.0, but remember – it is a bit like news or current affairs – it needs to stay fresh and be freshened up – or it ends up in the bin with all the other stale leftovers.

So what is Adobe going to do now with Business Catalyst?

While BC partners focus on the detail such as “are they going to expand the Triangle plugin?”, there is a bigger issue and that is the platform. Many of us were overjoyed that Adobe bought the system and not Microsoft, who are known for making radical changes and using customers as their QA team, but Microsoft is still involved with this – The system is built on .NET, using SQL Databases.

Why did they choose that platform? Try developing a system in Australia using Php/MySql and finding enough good developers – Those guys are a bit thin on the ground there, and anyway, even to us open source evangelists, .NET has proved to be quite stable.

But if you were a company like Adobe and you were looking at something that could become the world’s biggest hosting platform, would you want to be locked in to paying Microsoft Server and SQL licenses for eternity? I imagine there are some serious price discussions happening behind the scenes between the two companies and I bet there are other options on the table.

Linux and open source programming, certainly. I’d use a new, efficient programming language like Ruby on Rails – MySQL? Maybe not – after all, Sun is now the owner and the licensing of that database could always change. Maybe Adobe will snap up another good open source database like PostgreSQL – a relational database resembling Oracle and a good alternative to both MySQL and MS SQL.

Whatever happens, these are exciting days for BC partners and I think the speed with which the system is released to the Adobe community will be a good indication of the platform they have settled on. It would certainly take time to replicate the system in another technology.