langreiter.com plain, simple: comment-2002-07-18-1

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comment-2002-07-18-1

CREATED BY David Ness • LAST EDITED BY David Ness 7953 days AGO

We did our first `online calendars' about 30 years ago. They were a failure then. For the next decades we watched others try, and pretty much fail, to do similar things over and over again. Apparently it doesn't occur to anyone that perhaps people don't want to `share' their calendars much. Or that we only have time to fuss with our calendars if we don't have much of importance going on otherwise. At least each generation of systems developers seems to have to re-discover this fact for themselves.

I could do a number on just how many bad ideas Jobs managed to cram into his speech yesterday, iCal among them. But my view is not likely to be widely shared in this audience. Of course this may be `The TIme' that it catches on, but to me it looks like just another in a chain of really bad ideas that make Apple stock worth less today than it was in its early public days more than a dozen years ago.

Anyway, in the short run at least the market seems to agree with me. Since Jobs spoke yesterday the market has dropped the value of Apple by about $1b and at the current rate of `progress' that may be only the beginning.