61–70 of 123 posts
Borland Sidekick. The productivity software small enough to hide in your system. These days productivity software run under Electron.
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Undeniably the product failed commercially. By the time we decided to sell the company, the product was doing ~20M+ of revenue but on a low growth rate, after having gone through ~140M of capital with (not unreasonable) investor expectations of unicorn-like returns. That said, I absolutely loved Groove the product and Groove the team. It was a dapp with a wonderfully-usable interface, built on a pure P2P blockchain-l…
> Undeniably the product failed commercially. By the time we decided to sell the company, the product was doing ~20M+ of revenue but on a low growth rate, after having gone through ~140M of capital with (not unreasonable) investor expectations of unicorn-like returns. Groove's revenue exceeded expenditures, though, right? Or could have? I'm not sure it was reasonable to expect success at that scale for an entirely no…
Today it could almost certainly be built MUCH more economically - likely on the not-dissimilar and rich/mature matrix.org infra at the bottom, and using Electron on top.
And I would sell not to enterprises nor to decentralization zealots: I'd build a small focused GTM org focused on public sector and those who will need to collaborate when trying to deal with an APT.
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No, SkyDrive was always centralized server-side without any of the conflict resolution coauth concepts that Groove had. It was a completely separate project.
What about OneDrive For Business? I recall the executable was, confusingly, Groove.exe for quite a long time.
I’m intrigued by the comment that “there is nothing out there with the power and usability that Lotus Notes had back-in-the-day”. I didn’t have the opportunity to experience Lotus Notes personally, would be curious to hear the perspective of someone who used (or developed) the application.
A surprising remark! The usability of Lotus Notes was so bad that it earned itself an entire section on a site called the User Interface Hall of Shame.
For some perspective, this was an app developed by 5 core devs that grew to ~125M+ users who by necessity were split across implementations concurrently released for Windows 3/95, NT, OS/2, Mac, Motif, OpenLook, because we were an early enterprise product and needed GTM help offered by each of those platform vendors.
Our tiny dev team chose to prioritize platform breadth thru a "portability layer" developed in a pre-internet pre-browser era, with the constraint that its ~3M+ LoC (in C) had to run in a 250KB working set that grew to a couple MB by the time I left.
Yes, I wish the UI could have been better on each platform. But as a pragmatist I remain proud of the paradigm and its usability given the constraints.
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But why use a μEmacs when you can use actual Emacs, with its comprehensive scriptability? μEmacsen made sense on older platforms like CP/M and MS-DOG, but they're pointless today.
I often use zile, a modern mini-Emacs for quick editing jobs because it starts up instantly (yes, I know you can achieve similar start up times using the client/server feature of Emacs, but that always seems more work than it's worth).
Visual Studio clunks and grinds its way to opening, and I find I'm reluctant to exit it because it's slow to exit, too.
These apps have been "lost" for one single reason: they weren't FLOSS. There's plenty of software written in the 1980s that has been maintained since and is used today on modern platforms, because its code was made available under a suitable license. Proprietary software is a dead end, and proprietary online services only more so.
Other commenters have it right I think- network effects drive up the cost of not being on the dominant software. I also think that the security and privacy aspect plays a huge part too- it's one thing to install software sold by a retailer you trust in a non-networked computer, it's another to do so directly from a random website on an always on networked computer.
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I works perfectly fine today in Windows applications like Office.
Sadly nobody has figured out something like OLE for the web - cut and paste is a hit and miss affair.
It's weird to see the term "App" in relation to anything before iOS era. Back then such software used to be mostly called applications or just programs. [1] [1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=app%2Ccomputer...
I definitely remember hearing the phrase "killer app" plenty of times in the early 2000s, and Macworld definitely shortened "application" to "app" frequently in the late 90s and early 2000s.
I still use microEmacs, which floated around the intertoobs in the 1980s. Of course, I've modified it substantially over the years, most recently adding color syntax highlighting and Unicode. D version: https://github.com/DigitalMars/med C version: https://github.com/DigitalMars/me The "extension language" is it's so easy to just add some code and recompile it, there's no point in adding an extension language. I like…
But why use a μEmacs when you can use actual Emacs, with its comprehensive scriptability? μEmacsen made sense on older platforms like CP/M and MS-DOG, but they're pointless today.