Tim May wrote:
I am sorry that some folks heavily committed to the Linux route, or to Emacs, or to GNU/FSF, or to other approaches feel that their work is technically superior and deserves to be as popular as Netscape and simiar approaches, but reality is reality.
(And I could be wrong on the way things will unfold. All I'm saying is that technology is a moving target, that plans have to change, and that ease of use will likely win out over technical sophistication. Folks who think the stronger technology will inevitably win should pick up a copy of a 15-year-old book called "The Soul of a New Machine," by Tracy Kidder.)
I agree wholeheartedly with this. When General Magic first released the Telescript white paper, I was really hot for the technology. I tried to become a developer, I sent mail to every General Magic employee on the net I saw posting (one guy even CC'ed me accidentally to his manager saying they should hire me). I did searches in the media for any mention of it. Harry Hawk even had dinner with the VP of Product Development at General Magic. Alas, they would not give out alphas/betas of the development environment, which is all the same, because they don't know how to market Telescript and make it a defacto standard. Instead of charging for the interpreter/server, they should have given away the servers and development stuff for free, or near free, and made their money by selling services and clients (personal digital assistants using Magic Cap and Telescript). The result is that no one uses Telescript except AT&T. If I had gotten my hands on Telescript, I would have wasted lots of time and effort on a failed product (failed in my eyes, because of its potential) [lesson: proprietary programming languages fail unless they come embedded within a killer consumer application] Then I got into Safe-Tcl, which is a little more promising, but still a failure because there was no "killer app" which used it and which would encourage its incorporation into other servers and clients. HTML would have failed were it not for Mosaic. I was on the Web when it only had a line mode browser and it was about as exciting as Gopher. I think Sun has taken the right approach with Java. Giving out Alphas and Betas for free with source code. Encouraging heavy porting, and incorporating it into a "killer app" (HotJava). They will make money by licensing and selling tools and environments for Java, but their biggest success will be that it will become the defacto "enabled content" language. Java still lacks what Telescript has (the ability to checkpoint execution state and migrate execution across servers seamlessly), but what Telescript has that Java doesn't isn't enough to make people wait for it, or pay lots of money to be developers for. I could be wrong about how successful Java will be, but my confidence factor is high. -Ray