Over the last decade or so, everyone who loved to trash software engineering has been citing the case of Denver's 'new' Airport (I have some links here and here).
Now, there's a new, new thing for them to pile on: Chandler -- the personal information manager that was to be the last word on PIMs -- not! Scott Rosenberg has written a book on this project that went nowhere: Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software. The book has received at least one great review from Joel Spolsky (and probably from many others as well). Salon has an interview with Rosenberg, who also has a great WaPo op-ed on Micro$oft's travails with its latest mon$ter called Vi$ta.
For the sake of completeness, let me link to the Chandler team's post about the project's progress "since Scott’s narrative leaves off, around the end of 2005."
1 Comments:
Before Chandler, there was Eazel. It was a bunch of software hotshots wanting to create a new paradigm on Linux. They ended up spending several million dollars creating a new file manager, Nautilus, which didn't do anything interesting and crashed often. And then they went bankrupt.
Nautilus is still around and has improved a lot in the meantime, but even now isn't obviously better than Konqueror or lots of other file managers for linux.
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