Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 1st Jun 2008 09:40 UTC, submitted by tbutler
Back in 2001, there was a company who thought they could launch a sustainable business model around a file manager. They wrote the file manager itself, and figured they could profit from offering online services delivered through the file manager. However, the company ran out of money quickly, and wen they released version 1.0 of their file manager, they had to fire everyone, only to go down a few months later. That company was Eazel, and the file manager was Nautilus. Apparently, some saw this as the demise of the Linux desktop - others didn't.
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Member since:2005-07-28
Multitouch is innovation to me, it opens the door to a new level of programs and experiences. It is innovation because it is new and from there many will make it a start point, the library abstraction is nothing new and pretty much done everywhere.
MS Mesh is another great innovation in a different level.
Edited 2008-06-01 17:23 UTC
Member since:2005-07-06
Multitouch is innovation to me, it opens the door to a new level of programs and experiences. It is innovation because it is new and from there many will make it a start point
Multi-touch is not a new concept at all, and it isn't the holy grail because it introduces a way of interaction that doesn't cover all the bases.
MS Mesh is another great innovation in a different level.
Oh, so that's where you're coming from? Mesh is online syncing, sharing and storage between many different devices - as long as you use Microsoft's technology and all on Microsoft's servers. No, there is nothing new about it.
In reality, what people want is to synchronise their contacts, mail and other useful nuggets of information between their different devices. Microsoft simply won't do that because it threatens Exchange, so I wouldn't bother looking at 'innovation' from that direction.
In practice, Mesh rehashes what a lot of people are already doing and repackaging it as innovative (I ask you, they use phrases like "To Live the Mesh Lifestyle"), doesn't take the concept to a logical conclusion because it threatens Microsoft's licensing model, and is basically useless. What did you say about over hyping again?
Member since:2005-09-21
Multitouch is innovation to me, it opens the door to a new level of programs and experiences.
Multitouch is innovation, but multitouch has been around for a very long time (1982 according to wikipedia). Long before Microsoft Surface was even an idea. We have a multitouch table at my university, and they have been quite prevalent in research.
It is innovation because it is new
New to you. Not new in general.
Not to say that there is no innovation in Microsoft Surface. Of course there are new ideas there, but like everything else, it's 95% old ideas and 5% new ones. That's how technology advances.
and from there many will make it a start point, the library abstraction is nothing new and pretty much done everywhere.
You're being intentionally thick. Of course the concept of library abstraction is not innovation. But a cross platform desktop environment is a step above what has been done before. Just like multitouch is not innovation at this point, but MS Surface as a package has some new elements.
Member since:
2005-09-21
All of those things are evolutions on what was done before. It just depends on your definition of innovation.