Friday, December 27, 2002

Lately I've been asked very often for the reason of my obvious interest in failed IT-projects. That's pretty easy. One can learn much more by exploring the biggest mistakes of these projects. Beside this it's also very surprising to realize how many ideas which were once created in failed projects reappear in new mainstream-products. Actually, while reading a book about the Symbian OS I found out that the main task for the software team was to reimplement the Taligent OS. The Taligent team, a Florida-based alliance between Apple and IBM, had worked on a conceptually brilliant object-oriented OS, but has failed because their view of the end product was too vague. That means finally that the Symbian OS of our days means nothing else than a intelligent reimplementation of Taligent's object-oriented wisdom. In its mutated form the Taligent class-framework an other components became integral parts of the Java revolution. As an important center for object technology, Taligent provided key software components for IBM development tools such as the Open Class class libraries for IBM's VisualAge for C++.  Taligent also created a set of Java- and JavaBeans-based development tools called WebRunner and a groupware product based on Lotus Notes called Places for Project Teams.  In addition, Taligent licensed key Java and C++ technologies to industry partners such as Sun, Netscape, and Oracle, including a number of classes that are today part of Sun's Java environment.  By late 1997, Taligent software technologies had been awarded over 120 US patents, plus another 180 internationally. 2:47:21 PM