Saturday, August 10, 2002

Really interesting brain dump by Ray Ozzie on experiences being cross-platform with various products, from VisiCalc, to Notes and now Groove. Ray says that Lotus didn't need to be cross-platform (ie run on the Apple II and various weird almost PC clones) to kick VisiCalc's butt. That's soooo true. The PC was a juggernaut, and Mitch learned all you could learn about shoehorning apps into the Apple II's limited memory. VC was probably the best spreadsheet you could do on the Apple II, no oppty to challenge there. And Notes didn't really mean much on the Mac (I remember it was a big deal, but who uses Notes on the Mac). But (there always is one of those) I wonder if there aren't too many Windowsisms in the Groove code base today (4.5 million lines according to Ray) and if they had another version on another OS if those would be there. I know that we got going on XML-RPC and SOAP because we needed it, we had Windows and Mac code bases that needed to talk to each other. More to think about. [Scripting News] 9:29:47 PM    comment []