The Great Dashboard Conspiracy of 2004


Here is an excellent posting by John Gruber on the whole Dashboard/Konfabulator kerfuffle (if you don't know what any of this means, don't worry, it's really nothing very important). I completely agree with the points that John raises, unsurprising really given that they echo some recent thoughts of mine on the subject:

"Now think about this situation from the point of view of a big software company like Microsoft. They could come up with the same idea as a small ISV but take a year longer to get it to market (because of internal resource issues, testing, marketing, etc.) When they do finally bring the product to market it's likely to be better polished than the ISV offering, purely because the ISV has very limited resources and a need to get their product to market so it can make them some money - Microsoft doesn't have these same pressures (sure it has some of them, but not all of them and not of the same intensity that a small ISV will experience). When Microsoft does finally launch their version of application X what is the reaction? Most people will simply dismiss it as Microsoft being plagiarists or Microsoft muscling in on someone else's market. The simple fact is, however, that two companies had the same idea and both decided to develop it."

Posted: Thu - July 1, 2004 at 03:36 PM        

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