Jeff Bone:
> What users desperately need is something which divorces their computing
> environment / information from the specific platforms they use. The user
> is the logical connection point, not the machines involved.
I agree 100%. It's a nasty hard problem, though. You have to somehow
get your layer of lubrication into the various platforms (hard problem,
Microsoft and Apple certainly are not motivated to help) or magically cope
with all the (moving) data formats the user is involved with. This is an x^2
problem of input formats times output formats. I was there once with the DEC
Compound Document Architecture. (A friend of mine used to bitch: "Not
compound! Doesn't do documents well! Not an architecture!)
Unoriginal thought: Web services. If applications go away and local data
storage becomes uncommon, we get the (Reno?) divorce for free. But, then you
have users with all their data held hostage at Microsoft or Navisite or....
Becoming the next thing we have to free them from. I'm not sure this isn't a
Red Queen's race of trying to save people from themselves.
Eirikur
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Apr 29 2001 - 20:26:04 PDT