In light of the last day and a half revelations and discussions about Google’s Chrome browser, I’ve been thinking about comparisons of technological shifts in the past and how empowering tools sparked innovation, creativity, and new businesses.

In the late 1980′s, I was the proud owner of a Macintosh SE/30, a Laserwriter printer, and a copy of Aldus Pagemaker. The desktop publishing (DTP) revolution was in full swing, based in no small measure to the brilliance John Warnock and Chuck Geschke brought forth PostScript as the foundation for a company called Adobe, and perhaps the key enabler of the tools above to replicate digitally what was previously performed on much more expensive equipment.

My bride and I took her knowledge and trend forecasting expertise for the home furnishings industry, coupled it with the above-named technologies (and a bunch of books on type, design and more!) and we collaborated on mockups of a newsletter and created a new business now 21 years old with content publishing at its core.

Had it not been for the enabling tools — not cheap at the time and we had about $7-$8k invested — and an industry quickly reacting to the demand from all these suddenly empowered nouveau publishers, I argue that the Web as a publishing paradigm wouldn’t have evolved as quickly as it has since millions wouldn’t have been ready to create and deliver content and communications digitally.

As I discussed in yesterday’s post about the Chrome announcement, new, revolutionary ‘publishing’ paradigms are on the scene with Adobe AIR, Microsoft Silverlight, Mozilla Prism, coupled with what is likely to appear delivered inside Chrome due to WebKit (and SproutCore).

But where is the “Aldus Pagemaker for the Cloud” that will give some technoweenie and his bride today the opportunity to create a completely new business?

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