There's a long thread on Twitter today where people from Microsoft are reminiscing about the days when they put Netscape down, and then got in trouble with the DoJ. I remember those times differently, and very well. Microsoft was in no danger. They could have let Netscape grow, it never would have hurt them. For all of Netscape's bluster about device drivers, they had a really bad codebase, and a chaotic team that while blessed with a product that the web was growing around, had a long way to go before they could compete with Microsoft. #Microsoft could played a senior role, and helped the rest of us add all kinds of editors and databases to the web, and at least try to bring across some of the GUI innovations of the 80s. Instead all that was lost. Today, decades later, because of the chaos Microsoft brought us then, the editors on the web still suck. They are really inferior. Far less useful than the editors we had before the web. What if Microsoft had chilled and brought together the best minds from the PC era and asked some basic questions like how are we going to make the web better for everyone, at least as good as what we had before. What a time that would have been to do just that. But they acted like spoiled children. Andreessen et al could be excused, they really were basically children then. Gates had a dream of world domination forever, or at least until he was tired of it. So selfish, narcissistic, and so wrong. And the gloating and self-importance today, they still don't, even in retirement, understand that they held all of us back, that's why they failed to continue to dominate. Holding back progress is not ultimately a good strategy for world domination, esp at the leading edge of technology. #
BTW, I think Microsoft knew very well that Netscape was falling apart all on its own, but they used the device drivers crap to convince reporters that they were terrified of Netscape. Maybe they even sort of psyched themselves up for it, probably because they were bored. Who knows, but what could have been, and how much time we wasted, for their vanity. #
BTW, in yesterday's demo, I didn't mean that it was literally for Roam devs, that's just how I got started on this thread. I'm beginning to understand that Roam is a world unto itself, and that other products such as Obsidion and others are outgoing. Obviously it's the latter group that we'll be able to integrate with.#
I've been talking about Frontier a lot lately, the usual stuff, outliner, object database, verb set, threading, integration, etc. But I realized I leave out the most important thing about Frontier when I recite the features. Whenever we saw a protocol we could support, we did. And we even created new ones when there was a void, as with XML-RPC, OPML and RSS. The best part is we extended the language to make inter-app communication use exactly the same language syntax as local procedure calls. Factoring was also a very big part of the process. So it is kind of a central station, and always getting more high level through factoring. Our software is all about communication, and making it as effortless as possible. It still is, very much. #