Mitch Kapor: Good luck fighting Microsoft [ I hope he succeeds djf]

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Mitch Kapor: Good luck fighting Microsoft
By Charles Cooper 
Special to ZDNet
October 25, 2002, 5:20 AM PT
URL: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107-963325.html

I must have been one of the 10 remaining people on Earth, along with the
application's inventor and immediate family, who still used Lotus Organizer.

While other personal information managers got crammed with bells and
whistles, I valued the spare design of this vintage software application. It
worked without fuss and was easy to use. (Full disclosure as a computer
curmudgeon: I also was a die-hard Xywrite user until the computing industry
sold me out and embraced graphical interfaces.)

But my holdout status is officially over. Organizer, long relegated to the
software orphanage by Lotus, simply can't cut it any longer in my
increasingly Microsoft-centric work environment. So goodbye Organizer, hello
Microsoft Outlook. 

My raising of the white flag came as I learned about Mitch Kapor's ambitious
plan for a open-source "Interpersonal Information Manager." If this ever
becomes ready for prime time, I plan to offer my heartiest congratulations,
as there can't ever be enough software diversity. Truth be told, however, I
think Kapor is too late to make much of a difference.

The founder of Lotus and the designer of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, Kapor
is undeniably a computer legend. Along with the likes of Borland's Philippe
Kahn, Ed Esber of Ashton-Gate and Bill Gates, he was one of the stars in the
tech firmament at a fun time in the early software industry.

Kapor, whose post-Lotus career included stints as angel investor, venture
capitalist and social philosopher, never came close to repeating the
startling success he enjoyed with Lotus. The same goes for most of the
others. After selling Ashton-Tate, Esber became a recluse. Monsieur Kahn,
who wants nothing to do anymore with software, spends his time these days
trying to figure out how to marry wireless technology, the Internet and
digital media. (Bonne chance!) As for Gates? Well, you know how that story
turned out. 

In this second act, Kapor's not angling for the money or the glory so much
as he is looking to make life less comfortable for Microsoft. The
open-source project he heads is working on a PIM that will run on the
Macintosh, Linux and Windows platforms and won't require an Exchange server.
Kapor, who has stirred up considerable excitement with the announcement,
says he's undertaking the effort "in the spirit of Lotus Agenda" (an
innovative DOS-based application that Lotus later killed).

I hope Kapor proves me wrong, but his ambition to build an operating
system-independent Microsoft Outlook killer (my words, not his) rests upon
the optimistic assumption that a better product will always trump inertia
and thus loosen Microsoft's virtual hammerlock on the information technology
world. 

That's a leap of faith. Ten years ago, I might have taken that bet. Not
these days when traditionally conservative IT managers are especially
gun-shy about change.

Kapor wants to shake up the status quo. Though Outlook has lots to offer, he
says it's so complex as to render "most of its functionality moot." Kapor's
only partly right about that. Like most Microsoft applications, Outlook does
contain its fair share of wasted goodies. But the product works fine for the
usual mail, schedule and contact tasks.

Kapor also believes small and medium-sized organizations are chafing at
having to pay big bucks for Exchange so they can take full advantage of
Outlook's information-sharing features. Let's be honest: That's hardly the
reason companies buy Exchange. What's more, Microsoft is quite ruthless
about gutting prices when it encounters stiff competition. A monopoly
enjoying record profits has the luxury of going to the mattresses anytime.

Few comers have successfully taken on Microsoft of late. My hunch is that
this venture is fated to go down in the annals as an act of knight-errantry.
But while the project remains vaporware (or, should I say, Kaporware),
Kapor, a one-time TM (Transcendental Meditation) teacher, has accomplished
one not-so-small feat: He's got people talking about software again. And
considering the otherwise depressing state of the tech world, that's no
small feat. 

Now if he could only do something about fixing Organizer... 

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