whither Microsoft, now that their $86 million investment in Baystar has turned out to be a complete waste.
Ummmm, that $86 million was the best money MSFT spent since the $50,000 for QDOS. The chilling effect that the SCO suit produced for the Linux community was huge, and bought MSFT a lot of extra time.
And you can't even begin to imagine the degree to which it has slowed innovation in IBM Software Group. IBM engineers can't post without 10 person-months of review from Legal.
Malcolm Gladwell's admiring article from The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all about IV has an interesting point of confusion. In it, he makes repeated argument that great ideas aren't really all that rare, and that history has seen big inventions some from simultaneous sources on many occasions.
In order to get one of the greatest inventions of the modern age, in other words, we thought we needed the solitary genius. But if Alexander Graham Bell had fallen into the Grand River and drowned that day back in Brantford, the world would still have had the telephone, the only difference being that the telephone company would have been nicknamed Ma Gray, not Ma Bell.
If that's the case, Mr. Gladwell, then why do we need a patent system to incent inventors at all? It sounds like we would see just as much innovation without the much vaunted protection that is the foundation of a company like IV.
In fact, one of the IV ideas for a blood filter to prevent cancer was already in progress by another company. Well, why should that slow IV down for a millisecond? If good ideas are "in the air" as the article seems to propose, then the only thing we might need to protect is the direct manifestation of such ideas. If scarcity of genius is a myth then genius is not in need of protection.
Gladwell's article basically says "we don't need to patent system."
you name a state-supported monopoly in a market that does not tend towards monopoly, and I'll name a state-supported monopoly in a market that does.
Which markets would those be exactly? Why do I have a feeling you're going to name every market where state monopolies are standard course? That's just begging the question unless you name your markets in advance and justify that selection. There was a time when people thought telecommunications tended towards monopoly. And waste collection. And electricity.
Even within the Austrian school of economic thought, it's required that correction be made for monopolies in order for models to work efficiently.
Citation please? I studied with a number of Austrian economists for years. The only naturally occurring monopoly I ever heard one acknowledge was DeBeers. (Of course, it was Israel Kirzner, who is South African by birth, so there's likely some bias on that.) And with modern lab-produced diamonds, that hold has slipped dramatically.
But go ahead, link to a case where someone has been sucessfully sued for infringing on a software patent where the methods of implementation in question were independently developed. I'd love to see it.
So if I had a bad experience 3 years ago is it valid?
Given that the UI was a major revision point in a release that hit about 18 months ago, probably not.
Why on earth did it take so long for IBM to fix the biggest problem with Notes namely the UI?
I could probably offer a lot of speculation on WHY, but I certainly won't argue against the point that it took too long. That doesn't change the fact that it's happened now, though.
Does Notes still manage recurring meetings by creating 1,000 instances of the meeting? Who in their right mind even writes code like that?
If you have a meeting recurring 1000 times, yes. Who in their right mind goes to a meeting 1000 times?
It's coded like that for a very simple reason: keeping the email portion of the software behaving as an application built on top of Notes-as-a-platform. And there's a very compelling reason for that: so you can modify the behavior of your email program. Notes mail is delivered to the customer with exceptional extensibility. It's open source.
And the video you linked : "Encrypted Rich-text email" woo hoo. How about HTML?
Poor choice of words from the marketing department. The "Rich Text" in Notes has nothing whatsoever to do with Microsoft rich text. By "rich" they mean "more than just ASCII characters." You can incorporate formatted text, tables, links, images, inline attachments, and all kinds of other stuff directly into the email. And yes, it's not the only platform where you can do that.
Notes 8 actually displays HTML-based email with higher fidelity than Outlook 2007, by the way. And yes, I realize Outlook probably isn't YOUR yardstick.
While Notes might be great now, they sure burned a lot of bridges and that will always stand in the way of any world domination by Notes.
Won't argue with your point, but I will argue that it's not an evaluation of the SOFTWARE, but of the organization that produces it.
"Once upon a time, I worked at a company that used Linux as their primary desktop OS. The interface was horrible, ugly, cluttered, and didn't follow any of the conventions of the prior OS (Windows), or of any other possible prior OS."
Good for you. How about evaluating a product on its current merits instead of issues you had "once upon a time." http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software/lotus/lotusweb/product/nd8/demo/shell_popup.html
There might be a lot to dislike about Lotus Notes, but your experience with it in a bad implementation 8 years ago is not sufficient justification to karma whore by attacking it now.
In other words, the move from Notes to Exchange was a smokescreen for the Bush administration to lie to Congress.
See "Where Have All the Emails Gone?" for more information.
Slashdot Mirror
sorry... should read *can't post TO A WEB BOARD...
whither Microsoft, now that their $86 million investment in Baystar has turned out to be a complete waste.
Ummmm, that $86 million was the best money MSFT spent since the $50,000 for QDOS. The chilling effect that the SCO suit produced for the Linux community was huge, and bought MSFT a lot of extra time. And you can't even begin to imagine the degree to which it has slowed innovation in IBM Software Group. IBM engineers can't post without 10 person-months of review from Legal.
In order to get one of the greatest inventions of the modern age, in other words, we thought we needed the solitary genius. But if Alexander Graham Bell had fallen into the Grand River and drowned that day back in Brantford, the world would still have had the telephone, the only difference being that the telephone company would have been nicknamed Ma Gray, not Ma Bell.
If that's the case, Mr. Gladwell, then why do we need a patent system to incent inventors at all? It sounds like we would see just as much innovation without the much vaunted protection that is the foundation of a company like IV.
In fact, one of the IV ideas for a blood filter to prevent cancer was already in progress by another company. Well, why should that slow IV down for a millisecond? If good ideas are "in the air" as the article seems to propose, then the only thing we might need to protect is the direct manifestation of such ideas. If scarcity of genius is a myth then genius is not in need of protection.
Gladwell's article basically says "we don't need to patent system."
you name a state-supported monopoly in a market that does not tend towards monopoly, and I'll name a state-supported monopoly in a market that does.
Which markets would those be exactly? Why do I have a feeling you're going to name every market where state monopolies are standard course? That's just begging the question unless you name your markets in advance and justify that selection. There was a time when people thought telecommunications tended towards monopoly. And waste collection. And electricity.
Even within the Austrian school of economic thought, it's required that correction be made for monopolies in order for models to work efficiently.
Citation please? I studied with a number of Austrian economists for years. The only naturally occurring monopoly I ever heard one acknowledge was DeBeers. (Of course, it was Israel Kirzner, who is South African by birth, so there's likely some bias on that.) And with modern lab-produced diamonds, that hold has slipped dramatically.
But go ahead, link to a case where someone has been sucessfully sued for infringing on a software patent where the methods of implementation in question were independently developed. I'd love to see it.
Okay... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eolas
So if I had a bad experience 3 years ago is it valid?
Given that the UI was a major revision point in a release that hit about 18 months ago, probably not.
Why on earth did it take so long for IBM to fix the biggest problem with Notes namely the UI?
I could probably offer a lot of speculation on WHY, but I certainly won't argue against the point that it took too long. That doesn't change the fact that it's happened now, though.
Does Notes still manage recurring meetings by creating 1,000 instances of the meeting? Who in their right mind even writes code like that?
If you have a meeting recurring 1000 times, yes. Who in their right mind goes to a meeting 1000 times?
It's coded like that for a very simple reason: keeping the email portion of the software behaving as an application built on top of Notes-as-a-platform. And there's a very compelling reason for that: so you can modify the behavior of your email program. Notes mail is delivered to the customer with exceptional extensibility. It's open source.
And the video you linked : "Encrypted Rich-text email" woo hoo. How about HTML?
Poor choice of words from the marketing department. The "Rich Text" in Notes has nothing whatsoever to do with Microsoft rich text. By "rich" they mean "more than just ASCII characters." You can incorporate formatted text, tables, links, images, inline attachments, and all kinds of other stuff directly into the email. And yes, it's not the only platform where you can do that.
Notes 8 actually displays HTML-based email with higher fidelity than Outlook 2007, by the way. And yes, I realize Outlook probably isn't YOUR yardstick.
While Notes might be great now, they sure burned a lot of bridges and that will always stand in the way of any world domination by Notes.
Won't argue with your point, but I will argue that it's not an evaluation of the SOFTWARE, but of the organization that produces it.
"Once upon a time, I worked at a company that used Linux as their primary desktop OS. The interface was horrible, ugly, cluttered, and didn't follow any of the conventions of the prior OS (Windows), or of any other possible prior OS." Good for you. How about evaluating a product on its current merits instead of issues you had "once upon a time." http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software/lotus/lotusweb/product/nd8/demo/shell_popup.html There might be a lot to dislike about Lotus Notes, but your experience with it in a bad implementation 8 years ago is not sufficient justification to karma whore by attacking it now.
In other words, the move from Notes to Exchange was a smokescreen for the Bush administration to lie to Congress. See "Where Have All the Emails Gone?" for more information.