More than in any presidential election in recent memory, 2008’s candidates will be notable for uttering far less nonsense than the commentariat.

To illustrate: The reliably pseudo-eruditic George Will said, in a recent column: “Most improvements make matters worse because most new ideas are regrettable …”

So there we are. A few millennia after the Jews and Greeks invented the idea of progress, Mr. Will is ready and willing to bury it for us: This from a guy who doesn’t accept e-mail but has for inexplicable reasons endorsed the designated hitter.

George Will isn’t the only one with no confidence in progress. For example, I’ve worked with quite a few companies that avoid application upgrades in much the way campers avoid rabid badgers, although with less justification.

The attitude is understandable. Upgrades range from aggravating to horrible.

They don’t, of course, have to be as painful as some companies make them, especially the ones that consciously decide to go it alone with an application, usually because of the “need” to customize core code.

The result is predictable: Great pride in the result, right up until the time when the great pride is replaced by regret at having painted themselves into a corner. They discover their corneredness either because they’ve had to install a new version of an operating system or DBMS and their ancient application release won’t run on it; or someone outside of IT looks at the new version and says, “Wow! This has some features we could really use!”

This is why smart companies, when working with a package: (1) “Customize” it through use of its built-in configuration tools; (2) customize it by building stand-alone modules that integrate through its documented APIs or other entry points; or (3) adapt business processes to fit within the package’s constraints.

That’s applications. Companies avoid software platform upgrades at least as often, which in practical terms means they freeze versions of either an operating system or a database management system.

When a company upgrades an OS or DBMS, it’s a pretty good bet many of the applications that run on the platform will have to be tweaked to continue to run. It’s a process that requires a lot of time and effort, in an era in which many of the new features we see from software vendors appear to be justified principally by someone having thought of them without anyone else coming up with a better idea. Vista and Office 2007 are the poster children for this syndrome … if either has serious business-value-creating new features beyond what XP and Office 2003 had to offer I’ve yet to find them … but they are merely more visible than plenty of other equally valid examples.

So the decision is understandable, if misguided. Pay it now or pay it later. The more versions skipped, the more painful the upgrade when it finally happens.

Meanwhile, Mozilla has just changed the situation, and for the better, George Will notwithstanding.

Which leads to a prediction: Firefox 3 will turn out to be disproportionately influential in setting the direction of future software development, and not because of any new features.

While I’m sure it has them, many nifty, which I might even discover sometime, its niftiest new feature is that it renders pages a whole lot faster than Firefox 2.

Imagine every software vendor following suit. Right now, most of them too speedily push new features out the door. In the future, what would be speedy is their software compared to the previous version.

For decades, software engineers have complained that features, no matter how sloppily implemented, are all that matter. Nobody has cared about code quality.

Their arguments fell on deaf ears because their arguments made little business sense. New features used to reliably deliver additional business value. Code quality did not in any clear and marketable way.

The situation has changed. Quantum leaps in hardware performance aren’t as reliably certain as they used to be and data centers are running low on power. One result: Software vendors can’t count on increasingly fast hardware to overcome increasingly slow software.

Just as replacing a gas guzzler with a hybrid compensates for high fuel prices, so upgrading to software whose principle selling point is efficient processing will replace hardware upgrades as the most expedient way to improve performance.

That’s real progress. That it’s not in the same direction as it used to be is no reason to lose confidence in the concept.

My friend Willy Chaplin first became involved with the World Wide Web on the day people first started calling it the World Wide Web.

I might be off by a week or three, but not much more. In any event, by 1995, four years before Chris Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto, he already had a pretty good handle on the situation and encapsulated his thoughts into what he calls The Thirteen Commandments of the World Wide Web.

What he wasn’t very good at is self-promotion.

Credit should go where it’s due. Beyond that, for those readers of this column who have some level of Web responsibility (most of you), Willy’s Thirteen Commandments are still worth your attention. Here they are, abbreviated in bold, followed by my comments (because otherwise, this would be a very short column — just my intro plus the link).

1. Willy: The Net is completely voluntary.

Bob: Many businesses work hard to make the Web less voluntary — for example, financial institutions that make on-line statements free while charging for the paper version, and technology companies that put most customer service on-line, charging more for the other kind.

Less true isn’t untrue. Every Web practitioner should ask, frequently, “Why would someone spend time here, and why would they come back once they have?”

2. Willy: The Net is deflationary on ALL price structures.

Bob: Long before the Web, ads that included price pulled better than ads that did not. On the Web, everyone knows what you charge … for everything … and, thanks to Pricegrabber.com, how it compares. Or else, don’t show what you charge and everyone will draw the same conclusion: That you don’t want them to know.

3. Willy: Attention spans on the Net are short and getting shorter all the time.

Bob: Attention spans everywhere are short and getting shorter. This affects the Web just as much as it affects everything else. Write and present for short attention spans.

4. Willy: The principle virtue of the Net is asynchronicity.

Bob: Yup. You publish when you want. Your audience reads when it’s ready. It’s an on-demand medium. Leave pages up and findable so long as they’re relevant. Date them too, so readers will understand their context.

5. Willy: It is critically important to shorten development cycles.

Bob: For the Web, fast and good enough is better than too late and perfect, and lateness is as much of a defect as bad logic. Iteration and the Web are made for each other.

That’s the technology. There’s a reason the Internet has become synonymous with “unreliable information,” and you shouldn’t contribute to it. If you haven’t checked your facts and done a reasonable job of copy editing, don’t use the immediacy of the Web, or its ability to hide your mistakes, as an excuse.

6. Willy: The Net is international.

Bob: Culture and language, on the other hand, are still local. Few among your audience will be conscious and forgiving enough of this that they’ll say to themselves, “In California this sort of thing is considered just fine — I shouldn’t take offense, even though here we consider it an abomination.”

Decide on your audience and make the trade-offs. For example, I write for an American audience, recognizing that readers from other countries will have to perform some mental gymnastics to make it work, including, for some, figuring out what “mental gymnastics” means.

7. Willy: The Net is the most truly interactive medium ever devised.

Bob: Is isn’t the same as can be. The Net can provide the most scalable and flexible interactive medium yet devised. It’s still inferior to face-to-face conversation for rich interaction and nuance.

But as a medium … television, the movies, books, newspapers and magazines are passive. They have audiences. The Web makes conversations, and especially asynchronous conversations (#4) possible. This empowers your audience to become a community, with you as its convener. Much more powerful.

8. Willy: Because of the fickleness of customer loyalty, you MUST keep in touch with them, constantly reminding them you are there.

Bob: Nothing new here, except that the Net makes it cheaper and easier, so there are fewer excuses for failing to do so.

9. Willy: The Net is…A NETWORK.

Bob: Willy’s point: “From the standpoint of functionality there ARE NO SITES…just a single massively interconnected web of HTML pages.” My point: You’re known by the company you keep, so keep track of who links to you and be judicious about which other sites you link to.

10. Willy: Copyrights are nearly meaningless on the Web.

Bob: Willy’s point: Any effort to protect material on the Web is doomed to failure. My point: As a matter of practicality, Willy is right. If you want to protect it, don’t put it on your website. As a matter of business ethics … just because stealing is easy doesn’t make it either legal or ethical. Don’t do unto others as many will do unto you.

11. Willy: While not readily apparent, cooperation on the Web works MUCH better than competition.

Bob: Here I disagree. Whether on the Web, in a mall or on a street corner, cooperation is one business strategy among many, that makes sense in some circumstances but not others.

12. Willy: What the Web does best is form communities.

Bob: See point #7. Virtuality often makes community more real than in the physical world, where geography defines community much more than shared interests and values.

13. Willy: EVERYTHING is subject to change on the Web.

Bob: This is where I both agree with Willy’s statement the most, and disagree with it most intensely.

New capabilities hit the Internet all the time. New capabilities mean new possibilities, which in turn make constant re-evaluation of the fundamentals essential.

People, on the other hand, don’t stop being people just because they’re on the Web, nor do businesses stop being businesses. The fundamentals of human nature, culture, competitive essentials and profitability never go away.

They just take on different forms.