Don, (01)
That is an excellent two-word answer to my question. (02)
JFS
> Why haven't developers found a way to build multi-billion dollar technology
> on top of the SW tools? They might provide some support for importing data
> from those tools, but they don't use them as the foundation for their
> technology. Why not? (03)
DLC
> Legacy systems, usually. (04)
Yes. The most successful innovations build on the same infrastructure
as legacy systems, they provide a smooth and painless migration path
to the new systems, and they support 100% interoperability during a
transitional period that may last for decades. (05)
Example: Just look at the migration from one generation of telephones
to the next. The phone in my house with the clearest reception is an
AT&T dial phone that is over 40 years old. None of the newer phones
lasted as long. But the network still supports interoperability with
the latest and greatest smart phones, which people replace every year. (06)
Tim B-L's DAML proposal of 2000 of emphasized three words that did not
appear in the DAML final report of 2005: diversity, heterogeneity,
and interoperability. Throughout that report, Tim discussed the
legacy systems that had to be supported, especially SQL. (07)
In 2000, nearly every commercial web site, large or small, was built
around a relational DB. If the DAML project had taken diversity to
heart, they could have produced a set of tools that would have been
widely adopted by mainstream IT. (08)
But the DAML project was dominated by some very intelligent
academics, who had no experience with practical applications.
They did not ask how their tools would interoperate with legacy
systems. Instead, they assumed that they were so smart that their
untested research projects would be adopted by people who knew
far more about system design than they did. (09)
Moral of the story: Winners design their innovations to interoperate
concurrently with legacy systems. Losers ignore legacy systems, and
the world ignores them. (010)
Example: Steve Jobs ignored the SW, but Nokia poured millions of
euros into R & D projects that used the DAML tools. Guess who won. (011)
John (012)
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