The timelessness of the promises made in this specification are very interesting to me. A more idealistic (and younger) version of me would love to help build an open platform that could fulfill a lot of these promises, likely just because it's fun to build platforms. No doubt it such an effort would also be doomed to relative obscurity, not unlike the other various collaboration platforms that come to mind (Microsoft Exchange as an application platform, FileMaker, and of course, Notes itself).
The timelessness of the promises made in this specification are very interesting to me.
To me as well. Reading the PDF, it reminds me of WinFS, which I worked on. (Though I don't remember WinFS's collaboration story.)
Dreaming in Code [1] is a great book about Kapor's attempt to build such an open source platform, post-Notes. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the problem space.
I have no specific questions to ask, but I'm intrigued to hear you worked on WinFS. WinFS is something I wish happened, albeit I'm sure that what I thought it was wasn't what it actually was (since I never actually used it, wrote any code the APIs, etc, I can't ever be sure).
I was enamored with BeFS. When I heard about WinFS I was excited to think it might bring some of the coolness that BeFS provided to a mass audience. It's a shame what happened to both BeFS and WinFS.
Thanks for the link to the book. I had no idea that it existed. For awhile I kept checking-in on Chandler, hoping it was going to actually happen.
