It's an interesting transition. When I started my first company back in 1987, it was to develop add-on software tools for programmers. While that company eventually failed because the product it was based on was discontinued (read The Flexible Enterprise for the whole story), I stayed in the software tool-making business, sort of.

In 1992, I formed Component Software, which was to make database engines for multimedia. We eventually created a nicely successful product called FileFlex, which is in use in millions of CD-ROMs worldwide, including those produced by the likes of Apple and CNN.

In a strange twist of fate, I wound up writing a book on Lotus Notes (that's another, very long story...but that's when Denise Amrich arrived on the scene). Through another strange and bizarre series of connections, that book led us to the fine folks at the Cobb Group division Ziff-Davis, who asked Denise and I to start a journal on Lotus Notes. This was to begin our five-year relationship with ZD (and was to be the first of five journals we were to do on Lotus products).

Eventually, we wound up having two completely unrelated lines of business: the journals we were doing for Ziff and the FileFlex database engine (as well as a few other ancillary software trinket products).

By mid-1997, however, Ziff was apparently feeling the pressure of free content on the Web and decided to close down the Cobb operation in Louisville. While we still had the revenue from our software products, we definitely felt the loss of the Ziff journal-related revenue. More importantly, we'd found a business we truly identified with and seemed to "grok" on almost a cellular level. We really were into this journal thing.

And so, we decided to go it on our own. We reincorporated as Component Enterprises, Inc. Thus began the process that was to beget PalmPower. There was an enormous amount of effort and cost to create the first journal. We had to develop, from scratch, a revolutionary journal production system that would create the Web pages you're reading now. We had to recruit authors; put together an in-house editorial, production, and sales team; bring in the Internet feeds and the server farm; and work out an agreement with Palm Computing.

But, as you all know, we did it and PalmPower launched 14 months ago, in January of 1998.

Throughout it all, though, we also had our software business. A visit to our corporate home page would disclose a strange amalgam of business activities from developer tools to journals. In fact, we relied heavily on FileFlex revenues to fund the launch of PalmPower and then DominoPower. Unlike most Internet companies, we were determined that Component Enterprises was to be profitable from day one; we were going to live off our revenues. FileFlex, for a time, made that possible.

The problem was that FileFlex and our related software products had a de-focusing effect on us -- and on me. I was not only responsible for running the company and being Editor-in-Chief, I was also the lead developer on FileFlex. At times when I wanted to put my efforts into growing our Internet publishing business, I had to help provide technical support to database developers. It was, put mildly, a pain.