Putting squeak in business.

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Wed Nov 19 04:55:33 UTC 2003


Chris Muller <afunkyobject at yahoo.com> 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... 
> 
> I think the path to commercial success with Squeak on the large-scale you are
> thinking is to use Squeak to lead, not follow.  Attempting to imitate
> "web-browsing" and "word-processing" with Squeak would be a public-relations
> "death" for Squeak.  How would you possibly sell it? 

There are plenty of things.  Coolness alone will sell you a bunch of
them.  Squeak makes *great* demos.  How cool that everything is sitting
on your desktop waiting for you to mess with it?  You don't have to
double click and wait for applications to load.  Your data is just
*there*, ready to be moved around, edited, viewed, or tossed across the
network.

And if you are a power user, you're even happier.  If you like Visual
Basic or AppleScript then you'll go nuts with Morphic.

I don't see why everyone is so down on the thought.  OS/2 and BeOS had
plenty good followings during their time, and they were relatively
imitative.  As a closer example, the Lisp Machine still has rabid
followers today.  To do a SqueakOS seems to only take time and a
willingness to pursue success instead of just mess around.  It's a big
project, but it's not ridiculously big compared to the kind of efforts
floating around these days.  Imagine 10% of Netscape in its prime. 
Imagine 1% of go.com.


Dan Ingalls put it best back in the famous Byte article:

	"An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a
language. There shouldn't be one."


I'm tired of being left to wallow around in sub-standard OS's.  I put
what time I can into moving Squeak towards being an OS of its own, and I
think it will get there over some number of years, but a commercial
effort is a fine way to go and would speed things up.


Lex



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