 Wednesday, December 10, 2003
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The Marmot goes to Seoul for a day and has some fabulous food, which with remarkable insensitivity to the rest of us he photographs for us. Insensitive because it looks so good!
Not too far from the town of Sokcho on the east coast there's this little restaurant that serves something called sun-du-pu ji-gae, or tofu soup. They make the tofu onsite, and wow! is it good. Haven't found anything comparable in North America (nor would I expect to).
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Ross Mayfield blogs the Red Herring VC Conference, and Scoble has exactly the right retort:
There's a paradigm shift coming (heck, even if you don't believe in Microsoft's vision, look at Sun's or Apple's -- all computing platforms are going to see rapid innovation over the next few years. Yet the VCs don't seem to care and don't seem to be building companies to take advantage of the coming shifts.
Right!
At the Microsoft PDC a couple of Adobe engineers showed how they could build Longhorn applications using Adobe AfterEffects. Now normally you think of AfterEffects as a the tool of choice for creating special effects for movies. In this case they added a filter which output XAML, the new XML markup language for the Longhorn UI.
To me this was astonishing, in that it basically says that soon there will whole new paradigms of application-building: and that means whole new kinds of apps.
But a lot of VC's are stuck in what I call the bubble mentality, funding, as Scoble mentions, things like Friendster. Time to break out of that box, guys!
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I'm pretty unimpressed with the so-called Java Desktop System, the new desktop user interface from Sun. Mainly I'm underwhelmed because of its slavish imitation of the Windows XP user interface: OK, they changed the "Start" button to a "Launch" button...whoopee!
And according to other commentators, there's very little Java in the Java Desktop System! In fact, it's so named solely because somewhere in there is a Java runtime; the JDS is written in C!
Now Simon Phipps writes that there really is something innovative and interesting in the JDS. Simon's a good guy; I was on a couple of panels with him back when he was at IBM. He's excited about something called Project Looking Glass which adds 3D notions to the JDS. The idea is you can take a window, spin it around, rotate it and so on; so in theory you could stack windows on your desktop like CD's in a rack.
Well, maybe. Personally I'm not sure it's all that useful, although it's good to see Sun doing something other than copying its archcompetitors. (Wonder how soon they'll come out with an Avalon clone...)
(NOTE: I remember back in 1988 Ed Belove (Lotus CTO), Chris McGrath (1-2-3 manager) and I (1-2-3 architect) went to visit Sun to see their brand-new workstations based on something called a Sparc chip. Andy Bechtolsheim demo'd to us the very first "pizza box," and we also saw a brand-new GUI called OpenLook. We were impressed!...and I recall my pal Chris suggesting to a then unknown VC named John Doerr that maybe Sun should go retail -- sell the pizza box with OpenLook in stores. Doerr looked at Chris like he'd just beamed down from the Planet Idiot, but I thought then and still think that Chris had it exactly right. But then life is full of lost opportunities.)
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Nov Jan
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