Alan Grimes <alangrimes at starpower.net> wrote:
> My own experience with squeak is that it only needs a decient
> web-browser and a usable word-processor as well as a few layout fixups
> to be ready for prime-time... 

This doesn't sound quite as crazy as people are making it out.  You
would have to be very very careful, though, about what gets implemented.
 It's widely suggested that the vast bulk of features in Word, Excell,
and, dare I say, Mozilla, are not necessary.  If you relentlessly focus
on what is necessary to make a useful home computer, you could do it
with a dozen programmers and a year or two's effort, as an optimistic
estimate.  You would certainly not want to go down the list at w3.org
and implement every TLA they have, but you could do HTML 4 and style
sheets and JavaScript.

To make a marketable product, you'd also want to focus on *new* things,
things that don't fit well into existing systems but would be fine in
Squeak.  Imagine a file system where every file is a serialized object. 
Imagine invoking a program by deserializing it and sending #value:.

And if you really go crazy (another few programmers), you could
implement a POSIX and C compatibility layer on top of your SqueakOS and
let people run arbitrary existing Unix programs.  (Windows compatibility
is not really practical, as IBM has found.)

The business aspects are interesting as well.  Smalltalk went through
something like 5 major iterations over 10 years before being released to
the public.  You should plan at least 2-3 iterations, and preferably
more, before coming up with a real hit.  You'll want to dump backwards
compatibility at each step.  This sounds mean to the users, but it is
essential; it will give you a huge advantage over Microsoft, Apple, and
Sun, and it will give you a much better chance at the nth iteration
being the good one.


So I guess I have an estimate after all.  15-20 programmers and 2 years
for the first iteration.  You need good programmers, which I guess gets
you towards the 6-figure salary range  if not well into it.  So that's
in the ballpark of $2million for the programming effort.  That doesn't
include other business costs like offices, marketing, hardware, etc., so
call it $4million all told.   That means you can buy approximately 22
next-generation operating systems for the cost of a space shuttle
launch, or 12 for the average cost of a Hollywood movie.

	http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/codea/codeae/documentc.html
	http://www.didyouknow.cd/movies.htm


If you have the funding and the, ahem, tough guts, then go for it man!!


-Lex