Dropping a brick in the toilet is OK IF you do it right.
Mood:
bright
Now Playing: What's The Plan, Man? - Hippies conquer the whole "peace and love" thing (lost priorities)
Topic: Memories
I thought I might place this here to see if any mice (or rats) stick their head(s) in the traps. We don't want no nasty varmints nibbling on snookywookums little sticky-out things, now, do we? Noooooo.
We haven't talked for a long time about the global plan for a planet-wide network. It's been in the works for a long time, even though it may have been flubbed for a while by those who can't perform the critical junctures and don't want their monopolies compromised.
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/371/kellogg.html
IBM Systems Journal
Volume 37, Number 1, 1998
Internet Computing
NetVista: Growing an Internet
solution for schools
NetVista™ is an integrated suite of clients and servers supporting Internet access for students and teachers in kindergarten through 12th-grade schools. Developed by a small team of IBM researchers, NetVista is a prime example of using an object-oriented framework to support user-centered design and to accommodate Internet-paced changes in network infrastructure, functionality, and user expectations. In this paper, we describe salient aspects of NetVista's design and development and its evolution from research project to product. In particular, we discuss the factors supporting a sustained focus on end users over the life of the project, the object-oriented framework underlying NetVista, and the role of this framework in accommodating both evolutionary and radical changes to the design of the user interface and the underlying technical infrastructure.
NetVista began as a research project at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in late 1993, and evolved through several stages until its release in June, 1996, as IBM's K-12 solution for Internet access. The research motivation for the project included the desire to explore the capability of Smalltalk (an object-oriented programming language and development environment) to handle a communication-intensive client/server application and to simplify the complexity of the Internet and its use, which at the time was fairly daunting, particularly for nontechnical users.
(more at URL - you were expecting me to cut and paste the whole thing?)
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What do you mean "What does it mean?"? You certainly don't think I'm going to explain the whole thing right here right now, do you?
Besides, you've got more reading to do so you can familiarize yourself with the kinds of concepts that were floating around back in the early 90's and THEN you can tell your self you know where technology is going today.
Think it through a bit, sweety. Think through what Netvista intended to achieve. Think through what Microsoft thought they were going to achieve with Vista. Think through the aims, desires and dilemmas the rich and powerful have had in their noodles for decades and then, perhaps (but I doubt you have the nuglets for it) we can talk about this titanic struggle between greed and altruism and where it will take us (to hell in a hand-basket as granny used to say).
We haven't talked about the conspiracy theories for a long time. Perhaps it's time to re-open the book and read about Life and where we're all headed.
Too heady for a children's story? Grow up. Fast. "We" don't have much time.
(added June 1)
Now, think through this...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system)
Cairo used distributed computing concepts to make information available instantly and seamlessly across a worldwide network of computers.
Although Cairo never emerged as a shipping product, its main features were shipped as parts of other Microsoft operating systems.
(more at URL)
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...and explain how it is Microsoft has spent billions and billions to accomplish what IBM has accomplished today. Now, Microsoft is still marooned as an island of automation while IBM is delivering on their plans.
"Distributed computing" was a goal for all of the 90's and most of the first decade of the 21st century. All other players are working toward that goal with the internet as the underlying infrastructure of their efforts. What is keeping Microsoft unable to mate to other operating systems across the internet?
OR...
Was it all just a strategy to choke off small innovators?
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/4E2A8848-5738-45B1-A659-AD7473899D7D.html
1990-1995: Microsoft's Yellow Brick Road to Cairo
Thursday, December 14, 2006
The tactic worked so well that Microsoft repeated it in the following decade as Longhorn. Here's how it happened, and why Microsoft won't be able to repeat the same fraud again.
Cairo, like Apple's Pink, was vaporware. It was a loudly announced vision of the future to distract from the current realities of the market. Just as Apple's Pink was supposed to eventually match all the things NeXT had already delivered, Microsoft's Cairo announced things that would not be deliverable for a decade or more.
Microsoft simply had no car worthy of competing in the race, so it drew up an impressive picture of flying race rocket instead. The press, impressed by this compelling Cairo illusion, stopped comparing the ridiculously lame Windows 3.0 and DOS to the contemporary Macintosh and NeXT, and instead began comparing Apple and NeXT’s existing products to the future promises of Cairo.
Even NeXT believed Cairo would turn up eventually.
Like other victims of vaporware, NeXT had trouble selling reality because everyone only wanted to hear about Microsoft’s fictional plans that would not end up getting delivered for another half decade or more; significant parts of Cairo would never be delivered at all.
Unhindered by Reality
Without having to accommodate legacy compatibility with existing applications, and artificially isolated from having to compete in the market against real opponents, Microsoft was free to imagineer a magic future for a world ready to believe that everything Microsoft could plan would be delivered at some point, even though Microsoft had absolutely no history of delivering any significant or original operating system technology.
Microsoft's distraction hand was waving a hand of five Aces, but rather than questioning how that could even be possible, the press just gushed about how great Microsoft's future looked. The company's bluffing was actually empowered by the uncritical appraisal of the press, which only encouraged Microsoft to continue in announcing unrealistic plans.
(more at URL - well worth reading and bookmarking)
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Vaporware? Distraction? Decoys? Industrial fraud?
Could that be happening today? After Cairo? After Longhorn?
How would you know? Microsoft is in stealth mode. Just ask Ozzie.
Posted by Portuno Diamo
at 10:52 PM EDT
Updated: Sunday, 1 June 2008 12:56 PM EDT
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