Saturday, August 28, 1999

InfoWorld's Dylan Tweney on Deep Linking. "InfoWorld until recently had a restrictive linking policy, although it was essentially toothless. According to this policy, people who wanted to link to stories within InfoWorld's Web site were supposed to request permission first. The policy was widely ignored, as search engines and a host of other Web sites regularly linked to InfoWorld articles."

c't: Multiskript-Hypertexter. "Wem die händische Erstellung seiner wachsenden Webpräsenz über den Kopf wächst, sucht früher oder später nach einer automatisierten Lösung seiner Probleme. Unter MacOS und Windows findet die objektorientierte Datenbank Frontier daher immer mehr Freunde. In der Version 6 lässt sich das skriptgesteuerte Programm sogar durch Browser-Aufrufe steuern."

Don Hopkins: "In my big book of karma, Bill Joy has a lot of penance to pay, to make up for the psychic and aesthetic discordances he inflicted on the world by writing VI and CSH. He can have all the credit for those he wants."

Oliver Wrede: "I think Generator is far to expensive. They demand a licence at $3000 bucks for each processor on the webserver and $500 per developer using the developers suite."

Dave Winer: "Personally, here's what I'd like to see. A cheap Flash-based word processor with very basic formatting commands. That way I could write some text, see what it spits out, and learn how the Flash format works."

Cringely: "..a bad experience in the company's very first acquisition, when it bought Powerpoint. Even though this late-80s purchase was of a company with fewer than 50 employees, both Bill Gates and then-CEO Jon Shirley told me the experience was horrific for Microsoft. It was a problem of trying to merge corporate cultures that were very different. And the lesson learned was not to even try for such a merger. For the sake of Microsoft, the new model says that the corporate culture of the company being bought has to die."

From the It Could Have Been Me Department. Before Bill Gates and Jon Shirley decided to acquire PowerPoint, they had a Letter of Intent to acquire my company, Living Videotext. We lost the deal in a meeting with Shirley over exactly this issue. Shirley said that they'd offer everyone at LVT jobs, but that we'd become a product team and nothing more. "Oh the waste!" I thought. We had put so much effort into integrating the support and management functions of the company. Everyone was a MORE user, and on a career path to be part of the product team. I objected. They bought Forethought instead, the company that made PowerPoint. Don't worry, it was still hell trying to integrate LVT with Symantec.