Formtek Blog: 20 Years of Engineering Data Management and Technology History

The Formtek Blog began in January 2006. More than 20 years and roughly 5,260 posts later, it has covered an enormous range of ground: data management, open source software, enterprise software, security, artificial intelligence, ethics, alternative energy, and dozens of other topics that mattered to the people building and buying engineering software over two decades.

Most company blogs do not last this long. Interest fades, priorities shift, and the posts stop. The Formtek Blog kept going, through changes in the industry, changes in technology, and changes in what counted as news.

Where It Started

The very first post surveyed the state of the content management software industry in 2006, drawing on excerpts from Intelligent Enterprise and AIIM, two of the trade publications that shaped how the industry talked about itself at the time. It reads now like a snapshot of a young, still-forming market, one that had not yet settled on its own vocabulary.

Posts started out weekly. By September 2006, the pace had picked up to five days a week. In March 2007, the schedule tightened again: postings would go out at 7:00 AM, five days a week. That rhythm held. Not for a few months, and not for a couple of years, but for the better part of two decades, without a break.

A Trend You Can Watch in Real Time

One of the more interesting things about having 20 years of posts in one place is that you can trace how a technology trend actually unfolded, not the tidy, after-the-fact version that shows up in retrospectives, but the messier real-time version, with genuine skepticism mixed in with genuine hype.

Cloud computing is a good example. It first showed up in the Formtek Blog in 2008. At the time, Oracle’s Larry Ellison dismissed it as “fashion-driven.” Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project, was blunter: “It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign.” Two years later, in 2010, the National Archives and Records Administration warned that adopting cloud computing was premature.

None of that skepticism held the trend back for long. By 2012, cloud computing was experiencing unprecedented growth, and IT vendors were realizing that addressing the cloud was no longer optional. It was a matter of staying relevant. Adoption kept accelerating through 2012 and 2013. By 2015, the hybrid cloud was on the rise, and IDC was reporting that cloud spending had started to erode spending on on-premises infrastructure.

The pattern continued. In 2018, the cloud became the preferred delivery mechanism for big data and artificial intelligence workloads, and cloud storage became the standard approach for backup and recovery. By 2020, cloud computing had become the norm rather than the exception, a full reversal from the “premature” warnings of a decade earlier. By 2022, the conversation had shifted again, this time toward a new problem: multi-cloud sprawl, and how to manage it.

Read start to finish, that thread of posts tells a more honest story than most industry retrospectives do. Cloud computing did not arrive the way its early champions promised, and it did not fail the way its early critics predicted either. It took more than a decade of steady, uneven progress, with real doubt at every stage, before it became the default.

More Than One Thread

Cloud computing is just one example. The same kind of arc shows up across the other topics the blog has followed for 20 years: the slow move of open source software from the margins into the enterprise mainstream, the steady tightening of expectations around data security, the shift of artificial intelligence from a research curiosity into a production tool, and the recurring debates about ethics that arrive with each new wave of technology.

None of those stories moved in a straight line either. Reading through two decades of posts on any one of them shows the same pattern: early skepticism, uneven adoption, a few false starts, and eventually a new normal that looks obvious only in hindsight.

What Twenty Years Adds Up To

There is something to be said for simply showing up. Five thousand two hundred and sixty posts is not the product of a clever idea or a single burst of effort. It is the product of a schedule kept, week after week, for more than 20 years, through every shift in the industry it was covering.

Taken together, those posts are not just a marketing archive. They are a record of how technology actually moves: slower and messier than the hype cycles suggest, but moving all the same.