Computer Generalist
5833 Ross Branch Road
P.O. Box 262
Forestville, CA 95436-0262

Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 15:59:34 -0800 (PST)


Mr. Rod Welch
rowelch@attglobal.net
The Welch Company
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111 2496

Subject:   Where is that reminder?

Listen, fellah, you are on to some hot stuff, but it's going to be very tricky to get folks to understand and use such a sophisticated tool, that nonetheless requires careful and persistent attention.

Furthermore, denial is a way of life, and such confrontation with the truth is not often welcomed by most of us, most of the time.

So how do we get them to see? We have to actually love them enough to provide them with a real opportunity. That's the fundamental reason that I believe in open source. It removes barriers to using the best known practices.

You saw the value of this feedback, this "forced confrontation" with the reality of what happened, so clearly that you could direct the building of a tool that your talented friend could actually build so well that you could continue to use it for many years. It demonstrates its value to you every day. Dozens of times every day if you care to think about it for a minute or two.

One part of the process amounts to meditation. You deliberately put yourself in a state where you are not immediately concerned with your welfare or any other mundane truth. Instead you focus on understanding the meaning, and import, and facts of things just discovered and the specifics and implications of what happened as a result of the thing you did because you had scheduled it. Your tool permits you to record and annotate what happened conveniently, creating and filing away just the right consequential new node or lines of text in the right places, whatever you call them.

I go there because, that's what you have to give away. After many people have come to see the value, perhaps by trying it out over the web with NO setup penalty, and gotten addicted, then they'll realize that they want more. You will be an obvious candidate to satisfy their appetite and competition for your attention will drive up the demand for and price of your services, whatever way you would choose to offer them.

And I have other motives. If there is a chunk of valuable thought in POIMS, perhaps a symphony of great ideas, all working together, in cooperation with an active participating person, let's not lose it. Perhaps the varient fated to catch the wave and change our culture forever is something a 14 year old in Finland will do with the system that you put out into the open source community.

On the other hand, if you so much as publish a manual that one can read to get started with the system, any competent programming team can build software that looks like that. That means that it's not a great barrier to entry of some other competitor.

Instead, you should rely on your ability to recognize valuable improvements and innovations.

Enough for now?

I would like to see the manual, you know. And I'd like to recreate the system using Perl, in a tenth of the lines of code and a lot less time and effort. But of course, at this point that's a mere pipe dream.

Sincerely,


Dick Karpinski
The worlds' largest leprechaun
dick@cfcl.com