“I wanna go back, and do it all over…”
Yes, it’s time for another episode of “flashback” with the enterprise desktop dude! It’s circa 1987, and Eddie Money is tearing up the charts with hits like “Take Me Home Tonight” and “I Wanna Go Back” (see lyrics snippet above). Meanwhile, a company called Lotus Development is working on the latest iteration of its flagship applications suite – Lotus Symphony – which competes head to head with similarly integrated offerings from Microsoft, Borland and Ashton-Tate. Your intrepid host watches from the sidelines as he slaps together PC/AT systems while working as a part-time hardware techie after school (and passing the time by dreaming up ways to score with that cute blonde chick from home room).
Fast forward to 1995 and it’s the height of the OS war between Microsoft and IBM. Your intrepid host, fresh from briefing IBM senior management at a retreat in Rye Brooke, NY, wanders by the demo kiosk for something called “StarOffice” (Look, everyone, it’s from Germany!). The uber-geek manning the kiosk proceeds to fire-up a fresh OS/2-for-PowerPC port of the new “Office-killer” which proceeds to crash violently. Ever in the moment, your intrepid host quickly distracts Messrs. Lou Gerstner and Jerry York (IBM’s then CEO and CFO, respectively), refocusing their attention on the delightful demo at the next kiosk titled “How to crash Windows 95 in under 5 seconds” (hint: it involves debug.com and disabled interrupts).
Leap ahead another dozen years (for those taking notes that means today) and we find ourselves trapped in what I like to call a “marketecture causality loop.” IBM, now the owner Lotus Development’s IP, announces the release of “IBM Lotus Symphony,” which is in fact nothing more than a repackaging of OpenOffice which, in turn, is the descendent of the very same StarOffice program we saw splattered across an IBM-branded CRT over a decade earlier (and which still has the bad habit of barfing-up the occasional coding hairball). Talk about rehashing old bits! Meanwhile, your intrepid host is now married with children and passes the days contemplating his expanding girth and diminishing mental acuity.
“Hey, Eddie: It’s me, the enterprise desktop dude! I wanna go back, man! Take me home tonight…to 1987!”
Posted by Randall Kennedy on September 19, 2007 01:00 AM
